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Ed Mullins, the former head of the New York Police Department's Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA), has been charged with defrauding his own union of hundreds of thousands of dollars, which he spent on expensive meals, luxury items, and even a relative's college tuition.

Mullins, 60, a controversial figure with a reputation for excusing terrible behavior from the police and publicly lamenting about the decriminalization of marijuana, resigned in October following an FBI raid on the SBA office and Mullins' home. He had been the president of the union for 20 years. At that time, sources told the New York Post that Mullins was being investigated for possibly misappropriating union funds.

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice revealed that was indeed the case. According to the complaint filed by U.S. Attorney Damian Williams with the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, Mullins for the past five years was allegedly "submitting false and inflated expense reports to the SBA, seeking reimbursement for those bills as legitimate SBA expenditures when in fact they were not." From that, he managed to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars that his union membersincluding 13,000 fellow officers, both active and retiredhad paid in dues.

According to the complaint, the fraud all started when the vice president retired in 2017. The treasurer took responsibility for approving Mullins' expense reports and reportedly didn't bother to scrutinize them or even request receipts from Mullins. When Mullins submitted his reports, he would jack up the amounts charged. Just one example provided in the complaint states that he changed a $45.92 charge from a wine bar to $845.92. The complaint notes that Mullins in 2018 added this treasurer (who is not named in the complaint) to his slate for his reelection.

Mullins faces one federal count of wire fraud, which comes with a maximum 20-year sentence (though he will most likely not receive the maximum sentence if convicted).

Mullins, of course, is entitled to due process and the presumption of innocence until he is convicted. But, ironically, Mullins was a quite public and vocal opponent of this. He once tweeted out an attack on New York City's Civilian Complaint Review Board, calling them a "disgrace." He was offended by a tweet that simply acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment protected Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures and encouraged New Yorkers to file a complaint if this right was violated. Mullins complained on Twitter in 2018 that he might get into trouble if he tried to arrest a guy smoking marijuana at a subway entrance, so he didn'tand he shouldn't have arrested the guy anywaybecause New York City had long since decriminalized marijuana possession.

According to The New York Times, Mullins surrendered to police Wednesday morning and was released on a $250,000 bond. That seems awfully high for a nonviolent crime. Maybe he would benefit from some federal bail reform? Oh, right. He hates bail reform too.

Continued here:
Former NYPD Union President Charged With Stealing Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars of Members' Dues - Reason

Highland, Kansas, is a town of about 1,000 people surrounded by miles and miles of rolling cornfields. Theres one gas station, no stoplights. But Highland Community College is a magnet for people like Aiden Moore. It offered him something no other school did, namely a shot at playing college football.

It was really my last chance, says Moore, remembering a call he got from a Highland recruiter. I had interest from big-time schools, but I just didnt have the grades.

Moore made the trip from his home in Louisville, Kentucky, joined the Highland Scotties, and enrolled in classes. But he soon wished he had kept his construction job in Louisville. A sophomore this year, he says a white coach called him a gangster with a genius IQ and otherwise made fun of his intellect. He says campus police hound him and other black players on the team in a relentless effort to catch them smoking pot. He says townspeople sometimes seem scared to share space with them in the gas station or even to see him and other players on the street.

In a tiny school in a tiny, rural town, Black student-athletes feel conspicuous and scrutinized, even under attack.

Kejuan Carson, who hails from Auburn, Alabama, says he was cut from Highlands football team this month after he asked permission to skip a practice to finish an English paper.

And I thought everything was cool," Carson says. "But later on that day, that's when people started telling me I got kicked off the team."

He says the team has cut at least two dozen players, all of them Black, since the beginning of the year.

B.J. Smith, a former Highland womens basketball coach, says harsh treatment of Black student-athletes dates to 2019 when Highland hired a new president, Deborah Fox, who brought in a new athletic director, Bryan Dorrel. Smith says Dorrell immediately laid down the law.

His exact words were I needed to recruit more kids the culture of our community could relate to, Smith says. I honestly don't know what you mean. What, what are you saying? And he very aggressively said you know exactly what I'm saying. He wanted me to recruit more kids that looked like the people that lived in Highland.

From then on, Smith says, the school looked for excuses to punish Black players, suspend them from games and even expel them from school.

You need to look right. You act right, speak when spoken to, you know, there's a terminology for what they want of Black people, Smith says.

In 2019, Highlands winning football coach, Aaron Arnold, who is white, resigned. The next year, the ACLU of Kansas sued the school on behalf of four Black students, alleging it sought to reduce the number of its Black students. The school settled the lawsuit eight months after it was filed, agreeing to pay up to $15,000 to each of the four students and pledging to provide anti-discrimination and Fourth Amendment training to staff and administrators.

Smith, among the nations most successful junior college womens basketball coaches at the time, lost his job that same year when his contract wasnt renewed.

Carlos Moreno

/

KCUR 89.3

Earlier this month, Smith, who is white, and two assistant coaches, both Black, sued the school, claiming it was seeking to get rid of its Black student-athletes. Parkville, Missouri, attorney Bill Odle, who represents them, says the coaches refused to go along with a pattern of abusive behavior toward Black players.

It's a concerted campaign to make Highland white again, Odle says.

Fox, Highland's president, issued a statement strongly denying the allegations and asserting that almost half the student-athletes at Highland are Black, the same percentage as when Smith lost his job. She said the school is looking forward to presenting its case for getting rid of Smith.

Smith has been ousted before. He was the womens basketball coach at Southeast Missouri State University when the school was caught up in a flurry of basketball recruiting violations, resulting in NCAA sanctions. In 2014, while at Highland, he pleaded guilty to participating in an illegal car theft ring by helping to obscure the paper trail of cars that had previously been sold for salvage. Smith, who says he didnt know about the stolen cars, was given probation and Highland kept him on as the women's basketball coach.

But Smith said the school never specified what, if any, violations he had committed when it didnt renew his contract. Smith says the school is attacking him to mask its own deplorable behavior.

School officials declined to comment. But Ryan Kuhnert, a 2009 Highland graduate, insists the school values diversity.

When I went to Highland it was the most Black people I had ever encountered in my life being from a small farm town," Kuhnert says. "And it was a great learning experience for me."

Kuhnert says the schools treatment of Black student-athletes is in keeping with the strict discipline he saw imposed on everyone, white or Black.

Highland farmer Jerry Blevins agrees and says the college is just trying to strengthen its ties to the community.

The reason why they want Kansas kids, it has nothing to do with Black or white. They want local kids, so with their parents and family and stuff, Blevins says.

But the racial issues at Highland Community College were made stark earlier this month when The Kansas City Star published a recording of Fox likening a Black football player to Hitler, whom she called a great leader."

Fox said in a subsequent statement that she meant the player was misdirecting his own substantial leadership abilities and she apologized. But, for Ann Myers, whose son attended Highland, that apology fell well short.

That that was a bad, bad call. I felt disgusted as a human being, she says.

Carlos Moreno

/

KCUR 89.3

Myers sent off her son, Dominic Perks, to Highland Community College when he was just 17. In his second year, Perks, who is Black, argued with a campus security guard over whether he was properly signed in to eat at the cafeteria, which according to Myers he was. The guard accused Perks of uttering the f-word. That was enough to get Perks expelled the next day.

The teenager called his mother after he was kicked off campus, locked out of his dorm room and stranded five hours from his home in St. Louis.

It was a horrible feeling, recalls Myers, emotion rising in her voice. Because, you know, as parents, we are our children's protectors, we're the advocates. And at that present moment, I couldn't protect him. It still bothers me because I feel like he's always gonna be trying to prove who he is.

Now Highland Community College itself is under the microscope, struggling to show that it remains a stepping stone for Black student-athletes and not a place where their sports and academic careers go to die.

Read the rest here:
A small Kansas community college finds itself in the spotlight amid allegations of racial animosity - KCUR

In the past month, this column has twice addressed the unbridled propensity of federal intelligence agencies to spy on Americans without search warrants as required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

These agencies believe that the Fourth Amendment which protects the individual right to privacy only regulates law enforcement and does not apply to domestic spying.

There is no basis in the constitutional text, history or judicial interpretations for such a limiting and toothless view of this constitutional guarantee. The courts have held that the Fourth Amendment restrains government. Period. Last week, Congress got burned when the CIA released a heavily redacted summary of its current spying in the United States.

When the CIA was created in 1947, members of Congress who feared the establishment here of the type of domestic surveillance apparatus that the Allies had just defeated in Germany insisted that the new CIA have no role in American law enforcement and no legal ability to spy within the United States. The legislation creating the CIA contains those limitations.

Nevertheless, we know from statements of former governors of several states that CIA agents claim to be physically present in all 50 statehouses in the United States.

The agents who have infiltrated state governments didnt arrive until after Dec. 4, 1981. Thats the date that President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which purports to give the CIA authority to spy in America supposedly looking for narcotics from foreign countries and keep from law enforcement whatever it finds.

Stated differently, while Reagan purported to authorize the CIA to defy the limitations imposed upon it by the Constitution and by federal law, he insisted on a wall of separation between domestic spying and law enforcement.

So, if the CIA using unconstitutional spying discovered that a janitor in the Russian Embassy in Washington was really a KGB colonel who abused his wife in their suburban Maryland home, under E.O. 12333, it could continue to spy upon him in defiance of the Fourth Amendment and the CIA charter, but it could not reveal to Maryland prosecutors who can only use evidence lawfully obtained any evidence of his domestic violence.

All this changed 20 years later when President George W. Bush demolished Reagans wall between law enforcement and domestic spying and directed the CIA and other domestic spying agencies to share the fruits of their spying with the FBI.

Thus, thanks to Reagan and Bush authorizing it, and their successors looking the other way, CIA agents have been engaging in fishing expeditions on a grand scale inside the country for the past 20 years. Congress knows about this because all intelligence agencies are required by statute to report the extent of their spying secretly to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

This, of course, does not absolve the CIA of its presidentially authorized computer hacking crimes; rather, it gives Congress a false sense of security that it has a handle on whats going on.

Whats going on is not CIA lawyers appearing before judges asking for surveillance warrants based upon probable cause of crime, as the Constitution requires. Whats going on is CIA agents going to Big Tech and paying for access to communications used by ordinary Americans. Some Big Tech firms told the CIA to take a hike. Others took the CIAs cash and opened the spigots of their fiber optic data to the voracious federal appetite.

If the CIA went to a judge and demonstrated probable cause of crime for example, that a janitor in the Russian Embassy was passing defense secrets to Moscow surely the judge would have signed a surveillance warrant. But to the CIA, following the Constitution is too limiting.

Thus, by acquiring bulk data fiber optic data on hundreds of millions of Americans acquired without search warrants the CIA could avoid the time and trouble of demonstrating probable cause to a judge. But that time and trouble were intentionally required by the authors of the Fourth Amendment so as to keep the government off our backs.

Not to be outdone by its principal rival, the FBI soon began doing the same thing gathering bulk data without search warrants.

When Congress learned of this, it enacted legislation that banned the warrantless acquisition of bulk data. Apparently, Congress is naive enough to believe that the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, their cousin with 60,000 domestic spies, actually comply with federal law.

Last week, that naivete was manifested front and center when the CIA sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee documenting the extent of its domestic acquisition of bulk data on Americans.

Two senators who should have known better claimed they were shocked at what they read. They read an admission of continued CIA warrantless bulk acquisition of personal data on unsuspecting and unsuspected Americans, and they saw large portions of the letter redacted so that the senators do not know the nature of the data received.

So, notwithstanding the persistent efforts of members of Congress from both parties to limit and in some cases to prohibit the warrantless acquisition of bulk data by the CIA from Americans, the practice continues, the CIA defends it and presidents look the other way.

In 1947, Congress created a monster which today is so big and so powerful and so indifferent to the Constitution and the federal laws its agents have sworn to uphold that it can boast about its lawlessness, have no fear of defying Congress and always escape the consequences of all this largely unscathed.

I suspect the CIA and its cousins get away with this because they spy on Congress and possess damning personal data on members who regularly vote to increase their secret budgets. When will we have a government whose officials are courageous enough to uphold the Constitution?

Read more:
CIA spies and their collaborators | Opinion | journal-spectator.com - Wharton Journal Spectator

After nearly six years, a 21-year-old Black man who was wrongfully imprisoned for three weeks as a 15-year-old has agreed to settle his lawsuit against the city of Kansas City, Missouri, for almost $1 million.

Tyree Bell has settled with the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners for $900,000 after officers violated his civil rights by wrongfully arresting him in June 2016.

Tyree Bell (Fox4 Screengrab)

The settlement comes after the lawsuit was first filed in 2017 against the officers involved in the arrest as well as the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners, which oversees the department. The officers racially profiled and detained Bell, believing was a suspect in a firearms investigation.

On June 8, 2016, officers Jonathan Munyan and Peter Neukirch responded to a call that three Black male teenagers were showing off a firearm to other kids near 91st Street and Marsh Avenue. When the patrol car pulled up on the group and its lights were turned on the boys fled. Two of the boys were apprehended, but one got away.

At the same time as this incident, Bell was walking a few blocks over on 87th Street near a McDonalds restaurant. He had just gotten left summer school when a different cop nabbed him, believing him to be the third suspect. The officer took Bell over to Munyam and Neukirch and the two positively identified him as the boy that ran.

Bells lawyers argued that had the officers listened to his client, who maintained his innocence, and checked their police car dashcam, the young man would have been freed. Instead, he spent three weeks in the Jackson County Juvenile Detention Center.

While the teen was incarcerated, his mother contacted the police department and asked them to share with her the evidence they had against her child, however, they never did until almost a month later.

A detective finally looked at the dash camera video from the patrol car and discovered a grave error had been made. He spoke to a local prosecutor to get the charges dismissed and the young man was released on June 29.

Story continues

Subsequently, the Bell family argued that because the police did not consider the differences between their son and the suspects (i.e. hair, clothing, etc.), the teens Fourth Amendment rights were violated and his arrest was unlawful.

Originally, in March 2019, a lower court dismissed the familys lawsuit. The ruling concluded that the police in question were entitled to qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that stops government officials from getting sued.

Chief Judge Lavenski R. Smith disagreed with the lower court and submitted to the appeals court on behalf of the victim, Given the glaring differences, there was not arguable probable cause to believe that Bell was the fleeing suspect. Bells right to be free from an arrest and detention under the circumstances was clearly established. It is an obvious case of insufficient probable cause.

The Associated Press reported in 2020 that a three-judge panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the arresting officers violated Bells constitutional rights when they arrested the teen without probable cause.

They voted that the case should go to trial because the only thing that Bell had in common with the suspect was that he was Black, a juvenile, and male. A jury was presented with the case late last year. That trial ended after the jury was unable to return a unanimous verdict.

Sgt. Jake Becchina, a spokesman for the Kansas City Police Department, said in a statement to The Kansas City Star that the force wanted to come to a successful resolution for all parties since the Bell family filed the lawsuit in 2017. He also noted that the officers were regretful for their actions and wanted to personally express that to Bell. We made a mistake, and the arrest of Mr. Bell was in error, Becchina said in a statement obtained by Fox4.

Through the legal process, the officers involved made it known they would like to meet with Mr. Bell and apologize, Becchina stated. We are glad we reached a mutual resolution and we wish Mr. Bell and his family all the best.

Arthur Benson, Bells legal counsel, stated, It was a part of a national disgrace that has been allowed to persist among white police for forty years: cross-race identifications of Black males by white officers are often wrong.

And they are often wrong because too many police departments do not train their officers that all Blacks do not look alike and how to make an eyewitness identification that is not tainted by racial stereotypes Tyree Bell was a victim of the Kansas City Police Departments failure to address this national outrage, he said.

The agreement will pay $442,00 in compensatory damages to Bell and $458,000 to Benson and the rest of his legal team.

More news from our partners:

For What?! For What?!: Minneapolis Parks Officer Draws His Weapon On Black Woman After Spotting Her Gun Permit, Video Released Following Settlement

@JacksonMahomes You Didnt Have To Lie To Us | Patrick Mahomes Brother Accused Of Scamming Small Business

Black Americans Might Miss Out on the $68 Trillion Transfer of Generational Wealth. Heres Why.

See the original post:
We Made a Mistake: Black Man Wrongfully Jailed as a Teen In 2016 After Cops Misidentified Him Settles with City of Kansas City, Missouri; Officers...

from the going-to-need-to-have-a-deeper-discussion-about-expectations dept

Can cops pretend to be real people on social media to catfish people into criminal charges? Social media services say no. Facebook in particular has stressed -- on more than one occasion -- that it's "real name" policy applies just as much to cops as it does to regular people.

Law enforcement believes terms of service don't apply to investigators and actively encourages officers to create fake accounts to go sniffing around for crime. That's where the Fourth Amendment comes into play. It's one thing to passively access public posts from public accounts. It's quite another when investigators decide the only way to obtain evidence to support search or arrest warrants involves "friending" someone whose posts aren't visible to the general public.

What's public is public and the third party doctrine definitely applies: users are aware their public posts are visible to anyone using the service. But those who use some privacy settings are asking courts whether it's ok for cops to engage in warrantless surveillance of their posts just because they made the mistake of allowing a fake account into their inner circle.

Accepting a friend request is an affirmative act. And that plays a big part in court decisions finding in favor of law enforcement agencies. Getting duped isn't necessarily a constitutional violation. And it's difficult to claim you've been unlawfully surveilled by fake accounts run by cops. You know, due diligence and all that. It apparently makes no difference to courts that cops violated platforms' terms of service or engaged in subterfuge to engage in fishing expeditions for culpatory evidence.

Massachusetts' top court has been asked to settle this. And the state justices seem somewhat skeptical that current law (including the state's constitution) allows for extended surveillance via fake social media accounts. No decision has been reached yet, but lower courts in the state are adding to case law, providing additional precedent that may influence the final decision from the state's Supreme Court.

This recent decision [PDF] by a Massachusetts Superior Court indicates the courts are willing to give cops leeway considering the ostensibly-public nature of social media use. But it doesn't give the Commonwealth quite as much leeway as it would like.

Here's how it started:

After accepting a "friend" request from the officer, the defendant published a video recording to his social media account that featured an individual seen from the chest down holding what appeared to be a firearm. The undercover officer made his own recording of the posting, which later was used in criminal proceedings against the defendant. A Superior Court judge denied the defendant's motion to suppress the recording as the fruit of an unconstitutional search, and the defendant appealed. We transferred the matter to this court on our own motion.

Here's how it's going:

Among other arguments, the defendant suggests that because his account on this particular social media platform was designated as "private," he had an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in its contents. The Commonwealth contends that the act of posting any content to a social media account de facto eliminates any reasonable expectation of privacy in that content.

The competing arguments about expectation are (from the defendant) "some" and (from the Commonwealth) "none." It's not that simple, says the court.

Given the rapidly evolving role of social media in society, and the relative novelty of the technology at issue, we decline both the defendant's and the Commonwealth's requests that we adopt their proffered brightline rules.

In this case, Boston police officer Joseph Connolly created a fake Snapchat account and sent a friend request to a private account run by "Frio Fresh." Fresh accepted the friend request, allowing the officer access to all content posted. In May 2017, Officer Connolly saw a "story" posted by "Frio Fresh" that showed him carrying a silver revolver. Connolly recorded this and passed the information on to a BPD strike force after having observed (but not recorded) a second "story" showing "Frio Fresh" in a gym. The strike force began surveilling the gym and soon saw "Frio Fresh" wearing the same clothes observed in the first story (the one the officer was able to record with a second device). Strike force members pursued "Frio Fresh" and searched him, recovering the revolver seen in the Snapchat story.

The court recognizes the damage free-roaming surveillance of social media can do to constitutional rights, as well as people's generally accepted right to converse freely among friends.

Government surveillance of social media, for instance, implicates conversational and associational privacy because of the increasingly important role that social media plays in human connection and interaction in the Commonwealth and around the world. For many, social media is an indispensable feature of social life through which they develop and nourish deeply personal and meaningful relationships. For better or worse, the momentous joys, profound sorrows, and minutiae of everyday life that previously would have been discussed with friends in the privacy of each others' homes now generally are shared electronically using social media connections. Government surveillance of this activity therefore risks chilling the conversational and associational privacy rights that the Fourth Amendment and art. 14 seek to protect.

Despite this acknowledgment, the court rules against the defendant, in essence saying it was his own fault for not vetting his "friends" more thoroughly. The defendant seemed unclear as to Snapchat privacy settings and, in this case, willingly accepted a friend request from someone he didn't know who used a Snapchat-supplied image in his profile. In essence, the court is saying either you care about your privacy or you don't. And, in this case, the objective expectation of privacy is undercut by the subjective expectation of privacy this user created by being less than thorough in his vetting of friend requests.

Nonetheless, the defendant's privacy interest in this case was substantially diminished because, despite his asserted policy of restricting such access, he did not adequately "control[] access" to his Snapchat account. Rather, he appears to have permitted unknown individuals to gain access to his content. See id. For instance, Connolly was granted access to the defendant's content using a nondescript username that the defendant did not recognize and a default image that evidently was not Connolly's photograph. By accepting Connolly's friend request in those circumstances, the defendant demonstrated that he did not make "reasonable efforts to corroborate the claims of" those seeking access to his account.

[...]

Indeed, Connolly was able to view the defendant's stories precisely because the defendant gave him the necessary permissions to do so. That the defendant not only did not exercise control to exclude a user whose name he did not recognize, but also affirmatively gave Connolly the required permissions to view posted content, weighs against a conclusion that the defendant retained a reasonable expectation of privacy in his Snapchat stories.

The final conclusion is that this form of surveillance -- apparently without a warrant -- is acceptable because the surveilled user didn't take more steps to protect his posts from government surveillance. There's no discussion about the "reasonableness" of officers creating fake accounts to gain access to private posts without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Instead, the court merely states that "undercover police work" is "legitimate," and therefore not subjected to the same judicial rigor as the claims of someone who was duped into revealing the details of their life to an undercover cop.

The defendant may get another chance to appeal this decision if the state's Supreme Court decides creating fake accounts to trawl for criminal activity falls outside the boundaries of the Constitution. Until then, the only bright line is don't accept friend requests from people you don't know. But that's still problematic, considering there's no corresponding restriction on government activities, which may lead to officers impersonating people from targets' social circles to gain access to private posts. And when that happens, what recourse will defendants have? The court says it's on defendants to protect their privacy no matter how many lies law enforcement officers tell. That shifts too much power to the government and places the evidentiary burden solely on people who expect their online conversations to be free of government surveillance.

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Filed Under: law enforcement, massachusetts, police, privacy, sharing information, social media, third party doctrine, undercoverCompanies: snapchat

Excerpt from:
Massachusetts Court Says No Expectation Of Privacy In Social Media Posts Unwittingly Shared With An Undercover Cop - Techdirt