Police raid Md. mayor's home and kill his dogs

By BRETT ZONGKER, Associated Press Writer Thu Aug 7, 11:54 PM ET

BERWYN HEIGHTS, Md. - Mayor Cheye Calvo got home from work, saw a package addressed to his wife on the front porch and brought it inside, putting it on a table.

Suddenly, police with guns drawn kicked in the door and stormed in, shooting to death the couple's two dogs and seizing the unopened package.

In it were 32 pounds of marijuana. But the drugs evidently didn't belong to the couple.

Police say the couple appeared to be innocent victims of a scheme by two men to smuggle millions of dollars worth of marijuana by having it delivered to about a half-dozen unsuspecting recipients.

The two men under arrest include a FedEx deliveryman; investigators said the deliveryman would drop off a package outside a home, and the other man would come by a short time later and pick it up.

Now, federal authorities say they're looking into how local law enforcement handled the July 29 raid. FBI Agent Rich Wolf said late Thursday that the bureau had opened a civil rights investigation into the case.

A furious Calvo said earlier Thursday that he and his wife, Trinity Tomsic, had asked the government to investigate.

"Trinity was an innocent victim and random victim," Calvo said outside his two-story, red-brick house in this middle-class Washington suburb of about 3,000 people. "We were harmed by the very people who took an oath to protect us."

Calvo insisted the couple's two black Labradors were gentle creatures and said police apparently killed them "for sport," gunning down one of them as it was running away.

"Our dogs were our children," said the 37-year-old Calvo. "They were the reason we bought this house because it had a big yard for them to run in."

The mayor, who was changing his clothes when police burst in, also complained that he was handcuffed in his boxer shorts for about two hours along with his mother-in-law, and said the officers didn't believe him when he told them he was the mayor. No charges were brought against Calvo or his wife, who came home in the middle of the raid.

Prince George's County Police Chief Melvin High said Wednesday that Calvo and his family were "most likely ... innocent victims," but he would not rule out their involvement, and he defended the way the raid was conducted. He and other officials did not apologize for killing the dogs, saying the officers felt threatened.

The FBI will monitor how effective, fair and professional the law enforcement agency's conduct was during the incident, Wolf said. A police spokesman declined comment Thursday on the FBI investigation.

Police announced Wednesday they had arrested two men suspected in a plot to smuggle 417 pounds of marijuana, and seized a total of $3.6 million in pot. Investigators said the package that arrived on Calvo's porch had been sent from Los Angeles via FedEx, and they had been tracking it ever since it drew the attention of a drug-sniffing dog in Arizona.

Police intercepted it in Maryland, and an undercover detective posing as a deliveryman took it to the Calvo home.

Calvo's defenders — including the Berwyn Heights police chief, who said his department should have been alerted ahead of time — said police had no right to enter the home without knocking.

But officials insisted they acted within the law, saying the operation was compromised when Calvo's mother-in-law saw officers approaching the house and screamed. That could have given someone time to grab a gun or destroy evidence, authorities said.

Neighbors in Berwyn Heights, which Calvo described as "Mayberry inside the Capital Beltway," have rallied around the couple. On Sunday night, supporters gathered on a ballfield to pay tribute to the family and the dogs. A banner on the wooden fence around Calvo's yard read, "Cheye and Trinity, We support you, Friends and Citizens of Berwyn Heights." Around it were dozens of handwritten messages from supporters.

In addition to being the part-time mayor, Calvo works at a nonprofit foundation that runs boarding schools. His wife is a state finance officer.

"When all of this happened I was flabbergasted," said next-door neighbor Edward Alexander. "I was completely stunned because those dogs didn't hurt anybody. They barely bark."

The case is the latest embarrassment for Prince George's County officials. A former police officer was sentenced in May to 45 years in prison for shooting two furniture deliverymen at his home last year, one of them fatally. He claimed that they attacked him. In June, a suspect jailed in the death of a police officer was found strangled in his cell.

Calvo said he was astonished that police have not only failed to apologize, but declined to clear the couple's names.

His wife spoke through tears as she described an encounter with a girl who used to see the couple walking their dogs.

"She gave me a big hug and she said, `If the police shot your dogs dead and did this to you, how can I trust them?'" Tomsic said. "I don't want people to feel like that. I just want them to be proud of our police and proud to live in Prince George's County."


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080808/ap_on_...ijuana_packages

Officer suspended for allegedly flashing gun, demanding free coffee and pastries at Starbucks

August 8, 2008

BY FRANK MAIN Crime Reporter/fmain@suntimes.com

Over the years, cops have ripped off drug dealers, shaken down drivers and pocketed mob bribes.

But Chicago Police Officer Barbara Nevers allegedly aimed lower.

Nevers, 55, was suspended for 15 months and ordered into counseling for allegedly using her gun and badge to demand free coffee and pastries from six Starbucks stores on the North Side between 2001 and 2004.

Employees told the Chicago Police Board that Starbucks had an unofficial policy of giving a free tall cup of drip coffee to cops and firefighters in uniform.

But Nevers -- a desk officer for most of her 14-year career because of a neck injury she suffered in the police academy -- would usually come into Starbucks in plain clothes.

She regularly flashed her gun, and sometimes her badge, to get free coffee at Starbucks near her home, including stores at 3358 N. Broadway, 2525 1/2 N. Clark, 617 W. Diversey, 1000 W. Diversey, 1700 W. Diversey and 1157 W. Wrightwood, employees said.

"She was vehement about getting the free pastries," testified Cara Carothers, who managed the store at 1700 W. Diversey. "This woman is aggressive."

Nevers' attorney Tom Needham told the board "My client took advantage of a custom. She's not the only police officer that's been offered coffee." But a city attorney said it's against police policy for officers to accept such freebies.

Nevers claimed she always put a $2 tip in the jar whenever she got a free cup of joe and denied ever flashing her gun or asking for free pastries for herself.

"I said, 'If you have any broken pastries or ones that you toss out, I will take them because I feed the birds,' " Nevers told the board.

In June, five members of the police board found her guilty of retail theft, using her position for official gain, unnecessary display of a weapon, mistreatment of a person and other offenses. They voted for Nevers' 15-month suspension and counseling.

Two board members dissented, saying they would have imposed a stricter punishment, records show.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/1097903...-cops08.article

Cop fired for having sex with rookie's wife in station

August 8, 2008

A rookie Chicago Police officer knew he was going to have to sacrifice for the department -- but he never knew how much.

The rookie's wife was picked up by his supervisor, Sgt. Nicholas M. Ortega, who drove her to the Grand-Central police station on the Northwest Side and had sex with her. In June, the Chicago Police Board fired Ortega for the incident.

Ortega was in uniform toward the end of his shift when he stopped in the Grand Central Station bar in the 5700 block of West Grand. The rookie, a probationary officer, was at the bar and introduced Ortega to his wife.

Ortega, who was near the end of his midnight shift, invited the woman back to the station to see a morning roll call and drove her in his squad car, the police board found. Ortega, 46, admitted to having sex with the woman in the station.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/1097907...pside08.article

Should've never dumped Cline.

I have a feeling a good amount of these stories will be out of Chicago..

U.S. border guards arrest author Peter Watts

December 12, 2009

For Peter Watts, life can be stranger than science fiction.

Watts – who has written six such books – was on his way back to Toronto last Tuesday after helping a friend move to the U.S. Before crossing the Blue Water Bridge into Sarnia, American customs officers pulled him over. He says when they began rifling through his car and luggage, he got out. They ordered him back in the car; he asked what was going on.

What happened next has become the talk of the blogosphere: Watts too has waded in on it, posting that he was assaulted, punched in the face, pepper-sprayed and thrown in jail for the night, only to find that he was the one charged – with assaulting a customs officer.

Customs officials told the Star Watts was given directions "and became non-compliant...he did not follow directions and a physical altercation" ensued.

An officer with the Port Huron police told the local newspaper that Watts "angrily" got out of the rental car and when he refused to get back in, they tried to cuff him and he became "aggressive." In the melee, police said, Watts "choked" a customs officer.

"As a result of that he was detained and turned over to local authorities," says Ronald Smith, chief customs and border protection officer at Blue Water, adding officers were conducing "outbound operations" stopping and inspecting vehicles after the toll booths but before they hit Canadian customs.

Watts empatically denies any such action.

"I can state categorically that I did not choke anybody, I did not use profanity and did not raise my voice, I did not initiate any physical contact," says Watts, who is also a marine biologist with a PhD in zoology.

"All I basically did was use words to ask what was going on."

Now, friends are raising funds online to help Watts to help him cover his legal costs, which he says are overwhelming for someone who makes a living as an author.

Fellow sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, who blogged about the incident at boingboing.net, chipped in $1,000 right off the bat – and while no one will say how much has been raised in total, friend David Nickle said it's enough to get Watts through the first hurdle. Should the case go to trial, friends will arrange a fundraiser.

"It's a bit like trying to figure out the mindset of a grizzly bear," Watts said when asked why officers attacked him.

Watts' next court appearance is Dec. 22. If eventually convicted, it's a felony charge that could see him imprisoned for two years and a possible fine of up to $2,000.

Watts had driven to Nebraska with a friend to help a retired University of Toronto professor move there, but their rental car had broken down. The two were driving a replacement car the rental agency had provided in the U.S.

After the incident, Watts' friend was arrested and interrogated, but not charged.

Watts, however, spent the night in jail, in the standard orange jumpsuit, and was released the next day on $5,000 bail. He was dropped off across the border at Canadian customs, without his coat – it was in the car, which was impounded – during a winter storm.

Watts is overwhelmed by the online donations, and jokes that while most people must be supportive, "it's quite possible that some people think I'm a ...jerk, but they hate homeland security more."

If more money is raised than he needs, it will be donated to charity, he said.

Among the many comments posted at boingboing.net, are some suggesting Watts must have had an attitude when dealing with customs.

"The question is what is attitude?" he said. "I've been told by cops in the system that the mere act of getting out of a car, the mere act of taking any action at all, not simply responding to an order...is considered attitude...what they take offence to is not necessarily what anyone else would find offensive."

http://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/articl...eter-watts?bn=1

Illegally Park-ed
An Irvine cop ejaculates on a motorist but escapes criminal liability
R. SCOTT MOXLEY
published: February 08, 2007

Officer Park: put your hands behind my backNo one disputes that an on-duty Irvine police officer got an erection and ejaculated on a motorist during an early-morning traffic stop in Laguna Beach. The female driver reported it, DNA testing confirmed it and officer David Alex Park finally admitted it.

When the case went to trial, however, defense attorney Al Stokke argued that Park wasn't responsible for making sticky all over the woman's sweater. He insisted that she made the married patrolman make the mess—after all, she was on her way home from work as a dancer at Captain Cream Cabaret.

"She got what she wanted," said Stokke. "She's an overtly sexual person."

A jury of one woman and 11 men—many white and in their 50s or 60s—agreed with Stokke. On Feb. 2, after a half-day of deliberations, they found Park not guilty of three felony charges that he'd used his badge to win sexual favors during the December 2004 traffic stop.

Park, 31, was red-faced and unable to control his twitching foot in the moments before the verdict was announced; if convicted, he would have faced prison. When he was found not guilty, he briefly embraced Stokke. In the public seating section, tears flowed from his gray-haired mother's face. His father, a mechanic, closed his eyes and threw his head back. Outside the courtroom, surrounded by his family, a smiling Park said he felt vindicated.

Veteran sex crimes prosecutor Shaddi Kamiabipour—who'd called Park "a predator" during the nine-day trial—said she was disappointed with the verdicts. She also dismissed Stokke's contention that the Orange County District Attorney's office had overcharged the case. At stake, Kamiabipour said, was the principle that no one—not even a horny cop who'd once won honors for community service—is above the law.

"Park didn't pick a housewife or a 17-year-old girl," Kamiabipour said in her closing argument. "He picked a stripper. He picked the perfect victim."


* * *

In the wee hours of Dec. 15, 2004, Lucy (only her first name was used during the trial) finished her final shift at Captain Cream in Lake Forest, not far from the Irvine Spectrum. Management had let her go after an incident involving a female customer in a bathroom stall. According to court records, there had been a small amount of cocaine, kissing and breast fondling.

Meanwhile, Park was on patrol in the southwest portion of Irvine. Prosecutors believe he was craving a sexual rendezvous, and so he watched for Lucy's white BMW to leave the strip club parking lot, then tailed her, waiting for an excuse for a stop. Park insisted he'd been cruising on the 405 north and coincidentally saw Lucy's vehicle weave and speed.

Kamiabipour, the prosecutor, shook her head in disbelief. She knew the facts—that the officer had waited at least eight or nine minutes before stopping the stripper on a secluded section of a highway that was out of his jurisdiction.

"He was stalking her," she said.

Four months earlier, Park had stopped Lucy under similar circumstances. That time, he'd ignored a plastic drug baggie he'd found in her car and her suspended license. But the stop wasn't a waste of time. After friendly chit-chat, the officer had scored Lucy's phone number. Telephone records show that Park called the stripper the next morning. She told him she was too busy to meet.

On the witness stand, Park explained that he'd called Lucy out of concern for a citizen's safety. He also shrugged his shoulders when Kamiabipour slowly listed the first names of nine Captain Cream female employees—Annette, Denise, Rashele, Marlia, Brandi, Andrea, Deborah, Laura and Shannon—whose license plates he'd run through the DMV computer in the weeks prior to his sexual encounter with Lucy. (Another coincidence, according to Stokke.) Jurors also learned that Irvine Police Sgt. Michael Hallinan had previously warned Park as they left work to stay away from the strippers.

Park, who works in construction nowadays, conceded that he'd been given the warning but claimed that he had no clue it was Lucy in the vehicle or that she had an invalid driver's license, even as he approached her car window.

Kamiabipour believed she'd caught the 6-foot-3 cop in a lie. Records show he ran the bosomy, 5-foot, 110-pound dancer's license plate before the stop, did not call for backup despite the potential for an arrest and failed to tell his supervisor or dispatch that he was leaving Irvine. Several Irvine officers testified that Park's behavior that night was odd.

"[Park's] testimony was just incredible," said Kamiabipour. Irvine city officials must have doubted his story, too. After an exhaustive police internal affairs investigation, they felt it was prudent to give Lucy $400,000 to make her civil lawsuit go away—for fear a jury might give her much more.

In a secretly-recorded phone call to Laguna Beach police shortly after the incident, Lucy recalled that she'd told Park she had no license. Park began "rubbing himself up against me," she said. "Then, he said, 'What are we going to do here, Lucy?'"

Park unzipped his pants, took his penis out and got an erection, she explained. "Basically, the officer made me give [him] a freaking hand job and he let me go. I'm so freaked out about it."

(Lucy also told police, prosecutors and the jury that Park had also fingered her vagina and fondled her breasts before he ejaculated on her.)

"I was confused," she told the Laguna Beach dispatcher. "He called me afterwards. I'm scared, you know . . . What's an Irvine cop doing hanging out at a strip club in Lake Forest?"

Telephone records prove that Park made a 19-minute call to Lucy shortly after their encounter. The officer—who told the woman he was "Joe Stephens," an Orange County Sheriff's Department deputy who had died months earlier—said it was a friendly call to make sure she'd arrived home safely. The stripper said he told her to keep her mouth shut.

And then Kamiabipour introduced the bombshell evidence from a high-ranking Irvine police officer: on the night Park tailed Lucy out of the city, the global positioning system in his patrol car had been disconnected without authorization.

"I checked and [the GPS] was not working," said Lt. Henry Boggs.

An unexplainable coincidence, Park's defense countered.


* * *


For all his boneheaded mistakes, Park madea sharp decision picking his legal counsel. Stokke (and John Barnett, Paul Myer and Jennifer Keller) is among the elite of the local defense bar. His fine suits and mastery of courtroom procedures compliment the folksy, grandfatherly style he uses to charm juries. And there was this unspoken advantage over the prosecution: longtime courthouse observers have no memory of an Orange County jury convicting a police officer of a felony.

It wasn't a surprise that Stokke put the woman and her part-time occupation on trial. In his opening argument, he made it The Good Cop versus The Slutty Stripper. He pointed out that she'd once had a violent fight with a boyfriend in San Diego. He mocked her inability to keep a driver's license. He accused her of purposefully "weakening" Park so that he became "a man," not a cop during the traffic stop. He called her a liar angling for easy lawsuit cash. He called her a whore without saying the word.

"You dance around a pole, don't you?" Stokke asked.

Superior Court Judge William Evans ruled the question irrelevant.

Stokke saw he was scoring points with the jury.

"Do you place a pole between your legs and go up and down?" he asked.

"No," said Lucy before the judge interrupted.

"You do the dancing to get men to do what you what them to do," said Stokke. "And the same thing happened out there on that highway [in Laguna Beach]. You wanted [Park] to take some sex!"

Lucy said, "No sir," the sex wasn't consensual. Stokke—usually a mellow fellow with a nasally, monotone voice—gripped his fists, stood upright, clenched his jaws and then thundered, "You had a buzz on [that night], didn't you?"

As if watching a volley in tennis, the heads of the male-dominated jury spun from Stokke back to Lucy, who sat in the witness box. She said no, but it was hopeless. Jurors stared at her without a hint of sympathy.

In his closing argument, Stokke pounced. He called Lucy one of those "girls who have learned the art of the tease, getting what they want . . . they've learned to separate men from their money."

Kamiabipour wasn't amused. "Dancer or not, sexually promiscuous nor not, she had the right not to consent," she told jurors. "[Park] doesn't get a freebie just because of who she is . . . He used her like an object."

rscottmoxley@ocweekly.com

D.C. policeman accused of pulling gun to quell snowball fight


A Washington, D.C. plainclothes police officer accused of pulling a gun after his car was pelted during a Twitter-inspired snowball fight in downtown Washington has been placed on desk duty pending an investigation, The Washington Post reports.

Police initially denied any weapon had been displayed until video footage and witnesses indicated otherwise.

The video footage shows that the unidentified officer drew his gun and exchanged angry words with the boisterous crowd after his Hummer was hit by one or two snowballs, the Post said.

The City Paper reports said the police department, after initially denying a weapon was involved, issued a press release saying it had "subsequently received additional images and statements that would seem to support the allegation that the off-duty member did pull a gun" and was now investigating the matter.

The snowball fighters, mostly in their 20s and 30s, organized the "fight" at 14th and U street as a break from a huge snowstorm that had paralyzed the city this weekend.

The Post says 25-year-old Yousef Ali, a media and technology geek, spent 11 hours using Twitter and other social media to spread the word.

If the final investigation shows the officer pulled his weapon after being pelted with snowballs, D.C. Assistant Chief Pete Newsham, head of the investigative services bureau, said that "would not be a situation in which a member [of the force] would be justified," The Post reports.

"We have to see what the entire circumstance was," Newsham said Sunday. "But just a snowball fight, not in my mind. That doesn't seem a situation where we would pull out a service weapon."

I saw that.



To be fair, the students were getting out of hand - but that cop was definitely having his John C. Reilly/Magnolia moment.