Two police officers involved in the shooting death of 92 year old Kathryn Johnson pled guilty in Atlanta to manslaughter today in state court and federal civil rights charges in federal court.

Officers plea guilty in killing of elderly woman in her home -- Murder charges dropped because men agree to help federal investigation of Atlanta Police Department.

More....

New York clearly has a zero tolerance policy for Don Imus comments:

Two police supervisors are being investigated after officers accused them of referring to them as “hos” or a “nappy-headed ho,” the police said. One instance took place in the 70th Precinct in Brooklyn on April 15. The supervisor in that case has been transferred and stripped of supervisory duties, said Chief Michael Collins, a police spokesman. Chief Collins said the supervisor was accused of having addressed a group of officers jokingly as “hos.”

The supervisor was identified by Bonita Zelman, a lawyer for the accusers, as Sgt. Carlos Mateo. In the second case, a Queens narcotics detective, Aretha Williams, said yesterday at a news conference that a sergeant recently told her, “Don’t give me no lip, or I’ll have to call you a nappy-headed ho.”

As to zero-tolerance:

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a statement yesterday, “This language is unacceptable under any circumstances and even more egregious when it comes from individuals in a position of authority.”

I have to agree. There's no place for such comments in the workplace.

The Fulton County District Attorney is investigating a police shooting of two unarmed brothers in Fulton, Georgia on Sunday. Yes, this is the same District Attorney who chalked up a police shooting of a 92 year old woman as "another tragedy involving drugs."

One brother died and the other was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. The facts surrounding the shooting remain murky, in part because the police are revealing little information.

Ron Pettaway, [family members] said, was shot in the back of the head and his brother in the back. A police report, however, said Roy was hit in the stomach. The officers arrived on the scene, they added, well after the altercation that drew them there was over.

Rev. Markel Hutchins, speaking for the family, complains about a climate in which "police officers are now shooting first and asking questions later."

Hutchins said the Pettaway shootings are another example of excessive police force by metro Atlanta police. Twelve people were shot by police in DeKalb County last year alone.

Chicago Police Superintendant Philip Cline has announced his resignation amid the growing scandal of videotaped police beatings of suspects.

Cline has been under fire recently stemming from the conduct of Officer Anthony Abbate and other unnamed officers who are accused of beating citizens in separate barroom incidents caught on video.

....As the world was getting its first look at the grainy, graphic video of the burly Abbate pummeling bartender Karolina Obrycka, records that were made public showed that the Police Department had quietly filed misdemeanor charges against the officer a week earlier.

It's good to see a prosecutor express concern about police lawlessness. It's even better to see a prosecutor do something about it.

Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota characterizes the police in Ocean Beach, a Long Island resort village, as "thugs in police uniforms" who are "out of control." A grand jury agreed, returning indictments yesterday against the acting chief and three other officers for beating a Manhattan software executive, Samuel Gilberd.

Gilberd was at an Ocean Beach bar on Aug. 28, 2005, when a bouncer accused him of littering. Gilberd was taken immediately by the bouncer across the street to the police department, where he was issued a ticket, said the lawyer, D. Carl Lustig III. The lawyer said police "savagely attacked" Gilberd, kicking him in the gut and dragging him into a room.

The beating may be the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The acting chief fired five officers last year, who in turn sued the village, alleging they were fired for cooperating with Spota's investigation into corruption within the department.

Spota, noting that Ocean Beach has settled a number of lawsuits alleging police brutality, is vowing to conduct a "widespread investigation into criminal activity by police in Ocean Beach." Other accusations against the acting chief include his association with a drug dealer and his cover-up of "bar brawls" that are instigated by off-duty police officers.

Sean Bell was at his bachelor party the night before his wedding. As he was leaving, he was killed by a blaze of 50 police bullets.

The grand jury has indicted three of the five cops who fired at him. No one knows what charges they have been indicted on since the Indictments will be sealed until Monday. Photos of the five cops are here.

The grand jury has been considering murder, manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide. It deliberated on the charges for three days. More than 60 witnesses testified in the inquiry.

Bell's family maintains the cops fired without warning. The Rev. Al Sharpton had this to say:

"The only way you make sure it doesn't happen again is you stop it, and you punish it and you send a signal that we live in a society where laws have to be respected," he said. "So there is no joy, no vengeance, no party here."

Others have characterized the killing as a case of contagion-shooting.

A federal judge told William White that charges against him would probably mark a "dismal end" to his career in law enforcement. The question is why that career didn't end years ago.

White planted evidence on a suspect in a drug arrest. He was fired, as he should have been, but the police union helped him get his job back. Later in his career, White pointed his gun at a group of children as he berated them with racial epithets. He kept his job despite community outrage. Still later, he was sued for beating a 13-year-old. None of that was enough to end his career at the New Haven Police Department.

It took the FBI to uncover White's latest wrongdoing.

In what prosecutors said was the most damning evidence, Lieutenant White took $27,500 from a car that he believed was part of a drug bust in January, according to the affidavit. Over and over, he said that he did not want to hurt the informant or get caught on film. But in the end, he covered his face and took the money, writing the word “estúpido” on one of the bags that held the cash to make it seem that the car had been robbed (he first called several people to find out how to spell the word “stupid” in Spanish, the affidavit said).

Another Republican Representative from California is under investigation, according to the NY Times.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating whether Representative Gary G. Miller, Republican of California, improperly used an unusual tax provision to avoid paying capital gains taxes on profits from land sales to California cities, law enforcement and government officials said.

Miller avoided taxes on the sale of property in Monrovia by obtaining a letter from the City "suggesting that the land could be condemned." There was no apparent risk that the City would use its power of eminent domain to take the property. Miller may have used the same scheme to avoid taxes on the sale of property in Fontana.

Former New York police officer Charles Schwarz, convicted in the brutal sodomy case of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, has been released from federal prison to a halfway house. He served less than five years.

His plans for the future: to move to the "northern part of the country" and seek outdoor work, perhaps becoming a carpenter.

After a conviction, reversal and two more trials that ended in hung juries, Schwarz pleaded guilty to perjury. To this day, his lawyer argues the memory defense.

“The worst that Chuck did is that he saw Mr. Volpe walking Mr. Louima toward the bathroom, and when he was asked about that, a cop being a cop, he said he didn’t remember it,” Mr. Fischetti said.

Right wing chatterers, outraged as always, are calling upon the president to pardon Border Patrol agents who shot an unarmed Mexican in Texas. The agents, having been tried and convicted, would seem unlikely candidates to become a conservative cause celebre, but advocates of a more lethal approach to border security stand in strong support of their rogue tactics. In their simple world, law enforcement officers are always heroic, and suspected drug dealers from Mexico inevitably deserve to be shot. They have no interest in the actual evidence.

Johnny Sutton, the United States attorney who oversaw prosecution of the case, dismissed the idea that the two men were simply doing their jobs or defending themselves. During their trial, the agents said they had scuffled with the suspected drug dealer, who they believed had a gun, before firing at him. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” Mr. Sutton said in a statement last week, noting that the two men did not report the shooting to their superiors.

“These agents shot someone who they knew to be unarmed and running away,” Mr. Sutton said. “They destroyed evidence, covered up a crime scene and then filed false reports about what happened. It is shocking that there are people who believe it is O.K. for agents to shoot an unarmed suspect who is running away.”

Since when did conservatives lose their abiding faith in guilty verdicts?

The facts were bad enough when it seemed that Kathryn Johnston's death was the result of unnecessarily aggressive tactics in executing a search warrant. Now we learn that the warrant was based on lies. Will the officers involved be held accountable?

As TalkLeft reported here and here, Atlanta police officers broke down an elderly woman's door. The frightened woman fired a gun at the intruders, not realizing who they were. The police returned fire and killed Johnston.

The police obtained a warrant to search Johnston's property by claiming that a confidential informant had purchased drugs at her house. That assertion was a lie, invented by a police officer who otherwise had no probable cause to search. A second lie -- that the "dealer" resident had security cameras outside the house -- was used to justify the request for a no-knock warrant.

Lying under oath is perjury. The officer's crime led to the death of Kathryn Johnston. Will Georgia hold him accountable?

In a credibility contest between the police and almost anyone else, the police usually win. Not so in New Orleans, where a grand jury rejected the official account of police shootings on the Danziger Bridge six days after Hurricane Katrina. The police justified the slaying of two people and the wounding of four others as “an appropriate response to reports of both sniper fire and people shooting at police officers near the bridge.”

Lance Madison was arrested for shooting at cops, but a grand jury refused to indict him. Instead, it indicted seven officers for a variety of charges that include murder.

There may well have been shots fired near the bridge before the police arrived, but survivors of the shooting spree filed a lawsuit that raises serious questions about the claimed justification for gunning down the (apparently unarmed) people on the bridge.

On Sept. 4 about 9 a.m., Ronald and Lance Madison walked near the top of the Danziger Bridge, returning to their brother's dental office on Chef Menteur Highway after a failed attempt to go to their mother's home in eastern New Orleans. Ronald Madison, who was severely retarded, had insisted on staying in the city because he could not bear to leave behind the family dachshunds, Bobbi and Sushi. ... At the same time, according to the lawsuits, another group of people was walking at the base of the bridge on a trek to a nearby Winn Dixie to retrieve food and water. ...

Suddenly, the people on the bridge were confronted by a hail of gunfire coming from a group of men in "dark clothing" who had emerged from the back of a rental truck at the foot of the bridge, the lawsuits said.

The men “turned out to be the seven heavily armed, out-of-uniform police officers [who were] indicted on Thursday.”