In its ruling the PCC said the police officer’s privacy had not been invaded because the reporting of this comment was in the public interest.

After the death of Tomlinson during the London G20 protests in April, the officer posted an update stating: “I see my lot have murdered someone again. Oh well, shit happens.”

The People ran a story about the Facebook comment and another comment the officer made on Friends Reunited.
“The commission has recently made clear that it can be acceptable in some circumstances for the press to publish information taken from social networking websites, even when the material is originally intended for a small group of acquaintances and not publicly accessible. However, this will generally be only in cases where the public interest overrides the individual’s right to privacy,” the PCC said.

“The commission was persuaded that this was such a case. The individual in question was a serving police officer, commenting on a matter that was the subject of considerable media and public scrutiny. He had done so in a way that made light of a person’s death and the role apparently played by the police. There was a clear public interest in knowing about police attitudes, whether publicly or privately expressed, towards the incident.”

A picture of the officer on his private driveway and a picture taken from his sister’s Friends Reunited profile showing him in uniform were published by the People, but the PCC rejected complaints that the images were an invasion of privacy.

Two of the complaints accused the officer, identified by neighbors as Frank Tepper, of seeking retribution for his family members while he was off duty.

Three complaints, including the two involving his family, accused him of using excessive force.

And in a 2002 report, an investigator noted “ongoing tensions” between Tepper and neighborhood youth, and issued an ominous warning that his actions could have led to the use of deadly force.
But incensed neighbors, who painted Tepper as a bully with a track record for abusing his status as a policeman, said that the fight had spilled out from a party at Tepper’s home and that it had involved members of his family.

Several witnesses also claim that Tepper was visibly intoxicated during the incident.

As reported yesterday in the Daily News, Debbie Spencer said that while off duty in 2002 Tepper maced her 17-year-old son and his friend following an argument and that Tepper had failed to identify himself as a cop.

Spencer said she did not file a civilian complaint about the incident, but the mother of the other teen involved, Donna Walker, did.

In interviews with Internal Affairs investigators, Tepper said that his son had been harassed by a teenage boy who’d hung him on the fence of a neighborhood playground.

Tepper went looking for the teen but claimed that he had been stopped by a group of teenage boys who verbally assaulted and surrounded him. Tepper admitted to macing at least one of the teens and to twice drawingDonna Walker also recalled to police an incident two or three years earlier in which Tepper came outside with a gun after one of his relatives was hit with a snowball.

Walker’s son was throwing snowballs when Tepper “came outside waving his gun around. Apparently he does that a lot,” she was quoted as saying.

In the report, Donna Walker claimed that she smelled beer on Tepper’s breath shortly after the incident. Spencer made the same claim to the Daily News. Tepper denied to investigators that he had been drinking.

Sean Walker and Spencer’s son were charged with assault stemming from the incident and later sentenced to probation.

Tepper was “exonerated” by Internal Affairs, but an investigator wrote that he would have “been better served by waiting for uniformed on-duty officers to arrive. By failing to do so he is in violation of Commissioners Memo 98-1 Off-Duty Police Actions.”

Policies outlined in that memo include that “off-duty officers will not take police action in minor family or neighborhood disputes,” and that “in most off-duty situations, the best action an officer can take is to be a good witness and call 9-1-1.”

An activist with the improbable name of Paradise Gray described police as “trying to kill ants with a sledgehammer” when they confronted University of Pittsburgh students gathered in Schenley Park on Sept. 25.

ACLU legal observer Eileen Yackman testified that one of her clients was arrested in Lawrenceville on September 24 “because ’she was not running away fast enough.” The woman was on her way to meet a date, and could not ‘disperse’ in a timely enough fashion because she was wearing high heels.
The Citizen Police Board Executive director, Elizabeth C. Pittinger, promised a final report that would be useful for other cities hosting major international events like the G-20.

Two additional hearings are planned: one to hear complaints in Oakland, and another for police officers to offer their own testimony.

Ms. Pittinger said that the Board’s final report would be “worthy of global attention.”

Gary G. Rice was arrested Thursday and booked into the Garfield County Detention Facility.

A 42-year-old woman filed a police report on Sept. 15. It says she was sexually assaulted in 1982 and 1983 while living in Enid.

The woman says Rice, who was a family friend, forced her to have sex with him on at least two occasions when she was 15 or 16 years old. She says Rice also sexually molested her on three occasions.

Rice corroborated the woman’s story when police interviewed him.

Oklahoma law allows Rice’s prosecution because the crime was first reported to police just last month.

Police say within minutes of starting the operation, Street Crimes found numerous people engaged in prostitution activity. Interestingly police say that the bulk of those arrested are from Sacramento and Bay area.

Officers say they were told by some of the arrested that many of them travel to Santa Cruz because it is perceived as a place where you can make good money with relatively little concern about being put in jail.

Mr. Osayande spoke at a validation workshop on the Commission’s five-year strategic plan (2008-2012) in Abuja. He said the complaints commission is to curb the abuses and excesses of the police.

He said to ensure unimpeded investigations, the new commission will not be under the PSC, the Police Force nor the Police Affairs Ministry. He said the five year plan sets out the future of the PSC as expressed by the aspiration and inputs of the members of the PSC and management staff.

Various police reforms reveal that low public opinion and confidence in police due to corruption, extortion and improper monitoring and handling misconduct among officers. They also sought the establishment of a recruitment board comprising of a retired police officer, two serving officers (not below the rank of Commissioners) and one director each from the PSC and the Ministry.
The Director General of CLEEN Foundation, Innocent Chuckuma said government must fund its agencies including the police force fully so as ensure service delivery to the public. “State institutions cannot be run on a charity,” he said.

Officers announced a new hot line number at a news conference Tuesday.

“Citizens will be able to call (515) 271-4655 and leave voice-mail messages of specific traffic complaints, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” police said in a release.

The complaints will be assigned to officers. If the person reporting the complaint leaves a name and phone number, the officer will call back and report what action was taken.

No additional officers will be added to the traffic unit. Police Lt. Mark Buzynski said traffic enforcement is about 50 percent complaint-driven, and he expects that percentage to increase.

For Mercado and her family, last fall was a happy time, one they wanted to record and save in the venerable tradition of the family photo. Johnny Fernandez, Mercado’s boyfriend, had just emigrated from Lima, Peru, ending a yearlong separation, and on top of that, it was their son’s first birthday.

The photographs they took over several days in late October included pictures of Fernandez reunited with the family at their modest home in suburban Richardson. Others captured their 1-year-old son Rodrigo, and 4-year-old Pablizio, from Mercado’s earlier marriage, playing in a neighborhood park. Using the camera’s timer, they also took three snapshots of themselves, naked in their bed. They arranged their bodies in ways that showed less flesh than most freeway billboards.

A half-dozen others recorded the kids at bath time. Fernandez took several photos of the boys “playing around,” naked and innocent, with the oldest flashing a big smile. Mercado, who says she often bathed with the kids, is in several of the shots unclothed from the waist up, holding her arm modestly across her bare chest.

In one–the photo that would threaten to send Mercado and her boyfriend to prison–the infant Rodrigo is suckling her left breast.

After Mercado dropped off the film for processing, a technician viewed the images and decided they were “suspicious,” according to a police report. As required under Texas law, he immediately contacted local police. Mercado says that when she went to pick up her pictures, the clerk told her there would be a delay, and then only returned three of the four sets of prints.

To Richardson police, who arrived at the store that afternoon and apparently made up their minds from the content of the pictures alone, this was nothing short of a felony case of child pornography. “We thought they contained sexuality,” says Sergeant Danny Martin, a Richardson police spokesman, explaining why two Richardson police detectives began pursuing a criminal case. “If you saw the photos, you’d know what I mean.”

With nothing else to support their contention that the photos were related to sex or sexual gratification, the police and theOn November 13, the day Richardson police “tossed” or searched Mercado’s house, a caseworker with the Dallas County Child Protective Services Unit of the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services took custody of the children and recommended to a family judge that they be placed in a foster home. The caseworker’s notes state that a supervisor, acting on the content of the photos alone, decided that “the children needed to be removed from their mother’s care.”

Her hard-rubbed eyes drooping with worry, Mercado says she told the caseworker, “Please don’t take our children. We love our children.” Dallas County District Attorney’s Office presented the photos to a grand jury in January and came away with indictments against Mercado and Fernandez for “sexual performance of a child,” a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The charges centered on a single photo, the breast-feeding shot. Fernandez and Mercado say they took it–although the child had ceased breast-feeding–to memorialize that stage of their baby’s development.

“We wanted to see if he would take it, and he did,” says Mercado, explaining through an interpreter that it was a spur-of-the moment notion to which they gave little thought. “Johnny never saw the child breast-feeding, so this was for memories. For us.”
In the months since, one of the couple’s most onerous problems has been resolved. In late March, a week after the Dallas Observer asked District Attorney Bill Hill about the case, he ordered the criminal charges against both parents dropped. “It has some gray areas to it, but it doesn’t rise to the level of a crime,” Hill said. He said justice comes from more than isolating facts and interpreting them in a way to make them narrowly fit into a criminal statute.

Still, at press time, child welfare authorities continue to maintain control of the boys, even though a lawyer appointed to represent them says he believes they should go home. In its latest legal filing, the state said it would not consent to releasing the boys until the couple jumps through more hoops, including a lie-detector test they must take at their own expense.

“They ripped out my heart,” Mercado says. “Even if we get them back, I don’t know how we’ll recover from what’s been done.”

“How could they accuse me of doing something with our own children?” says Fernandez, a lanky 35-year-old who worked as a hospital technician in Peru before embarking on his disastrous start in Texas. “How can they accuse us of being something we’re not?”

It wasn’t difficult at all.

For Mercado and her family, last fall was a happy time, one they wanted to record and save in the venerable tradition of the family photo. Johnny Fernandez, Mercado’s boyfriend, had just emigrated from Lima, Peru, ending a yearlong separation, and on top of that, it was their son’s first birthday.

The photographs they took over several days in late October included pictures of Fernandez reunited with the family at their modest home in suburban Richardson. Others captured their 1-year-old son Rodrigo, and 4-year-old Pablizio, from Mercado’s earlier marriage, playing in a neighborhood park. Using the camera’s timer, they also took three snapshots of themselves, naked in their bed. They arranged their bodies in ways that showed less flesh than most freeway billboards.

A half-dozen others recorded the kids at bath time. Fernandez took several photos of the boys “playing around,” naked and innocent, with the oldest flashing a big smile. Mercado, who says she often bathed with the kids, is in several of the shots unclothed from the waist up, holding her arm modestly across her bare chest.

In one–the photo that would threaten to send Mercado and her boyfriend to prison–the infant Rodrigo is suckling her left breast.

After Mercado dropped off the film for processing, a technician viewed the images and decided they were “suspicious,” according to a police report. As required under Texas law, he immediately contacted local police. Mercado says that when she went to pick up her pictures, the clerk told her there would be a delay, and then only returned three of the four sets of prints.

To Richardson police, who arrived at the store that afternoon and apparently made up their minds from the content of the pictures alone, this was nothing short of a felony case of child pornography. “We thought they contained sexuality,” says Sergeant Danny Martin, a Richardson police spokesman, explaining why two Richardson police detectives began pursuing a criminal case. “If you saw the photos, you’d know what I mean.”

With nothing else to support their contention that the photos were related to sex or sexual gratification, the police and theOn November 13, the day Richardson police “tossed” or searched Mercado’s house, a caseworker with the Dallas County Child Protective Services Unit of the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services took custody of the children and recommended to a family judge that they be placed in a foster home. The caseworker’s notes state that a supervisor, acting on the content of the photos alone, decided that “the children needed to be removed from their mother’s care.”

Her hard-rubbed eyes drooping with worry, Mercado says she told the caseworker, “Please don’t take our children. We love our children.” Dallas County District Attorney’s Office presented the photos to a grand jury in January and came away with indictments against Mercado and Fernandez for “sexual performance of a child,” a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The charges centered on a single photo, the breast-feeding shot. Fernandez and Mercado say they took it–although the child had ceased breast-feeding–to memorialize that stage of their baby’s development.

“We wanted to see if he would take it, and he did,” says Mercado, explaining through an interpreter that it was a spur-of-the moment notion to which they gave little thought. “Johnny never saw the child breast-feeding, so this was for memories. For us.”
In the months since, one of the couple’s most onerous problems has been resolved. In late March, a week after the Dallas Observer asked District Attorney Bill Hill about the case, he ordered the criminal charges against both parents dropped. “It has some gray areas to it, but it doesn’t rise to the level of a crime,” Hill said. He said justice comes from more than isolating facts and interpreting them in a way to make them narrowly fit into a criminal statute.

Still, at press time, child welfare authorities continue to maintain control of the boys, even though a lawyer appointed to represent them says he believes they should go home. In its latest legal filing, the state said it would not consent to releasing the boys until the couple jumps through more hoops, including a lie-detector test they must take at their own expense.

“They ripped out my heart,” Mercado says. “Even if we get them back, I don’t know how we’ll recover from what’s been done.”

“How could they accuse me of doing something with our own children?” says Fernandez, a lanky 35-year-old who worked as a hospital technician in Peru before embarking on his disastrous start in Texas. “How can they accuse us of being something we’re not?”

It wasn’t difficult at all.

The exact nature of the complaints is unclear. But UT-Dallas, along with the UT System, has been investigating possible misuse of state resources at its police department. So far, two employees – including the former police chief – have resigned, and two others, including the assistant police chief, have been fired. A fifth employee remains on administrative leave, according to UT-Dallas officials.

“The investigation is ongoing in cooperation with all the relevant authorities,” campus spokeswoman Susan Rogers said Monday. She declined to elaborate.The letter also indicates that various complaints about the police department concern “ethical questions, standards of conduct, financial reporting and/or the internal accounting practices used.” It is not clear which concerns were forwarded to the district attorney.

Colleen Ridge, the longtime chief of the UT-Dallas police department, was placed on leave in April, and she resigned in May.

In June, four more employees were put on leave: Assistant Police Chief Debra Marable; Officer Ryan Ballard; Tammy Grigg, a noncommissioned guard; and administrative assistant Mary Spradlin.

This month, Marable and Ballard were fired, and Grigg resigned, UT-Dallas officials said. Spradlin remains on leave.