Wrong. Internal affairs policies CLEARLY state that they must also investigate criminal, statutory allegations that their police officers may have committed. So, with that being said, any time I witnessed a crime (submitting ACTUALLY VERIFIABLE false documents for recording, for instance, as well as ACTUALLY lying against bodycam footage, as well as committing ACTUAL perjury in court) I expected those allegations to be honestly and fairly investigated. And you know what they tried to pull when I reported such things? They either "ratified" that what I was reporting was not illegal behavior, or they did exactly what you just advocated in your post, and tried to pull that they are "only responsible for investigating policy violations committed by their officers." You want an ugly example? The whole Denver Internal Affairs, and even their internal affairs (the Office Of The Independent Monitor) and even the Denver DA too, all decided, likely because of an image problem, that they would rather "ratify" that Denver University security guards have Terry-like reasonable suspicion powers to detain for investigations within their own property, than take my complaint seriously. I kid you not. The facts were clearly laid out, to which nobody even disputed. One night security guards impersonated cops and detained my brother and I, and ran our names without cops present, whereby they fooled us into thinking they were cops, and had even said they were cops when we first asked them, whereby we only find out after the fact that they were in fact not cops, to which we immediately reported the impersonation and false imprisonment charges to the local Denver police, to which, you guessed it, we got shafted all the way up the chains, and have yet (it's on our list of things to do) report to the next highest level up, the only level left to go, the Denver mayor's office, that everybody below him just gave security guards police powers to detain, and won't do anything about whatsoever.
Wow, have you not read any of my previous posts? Easier said than done. And I don't want to go it alone. And I have a BUNCH of these cases that I got backed up on. And I can't get help from attorneys without having the evidence / police reports / affidavits / etc. laid out first for them to work with. I don't think you understand how "witness tampered" I am. Between my brother and I, we got backed up on OVER TWO DOZEN false imprisonments over the last two years, which if you pile that on top of being homeless, and defamed by everybody and their mothers, we don't have many resources to work with in the first place. We have a statute of limitations of two years that we can still make most of our filings within. But your picture perfect world that YOU may be living in, others don't have such a luxury of living in, and have to work with what they've got, which in our cases, is VERY little. And I have a serious stomach condition that all but disables me, so I don't have much time in my day that I can spend on both getting resources to survive, and then getting resources to file lawsuits with. Time and money are tight, and if I knew of a better route / better tools / better resources to work with, you better believe I would have been taking advantage of them by now!
Yeah, not EVERYTHING must always *automatically* end up in court. There is plenty of case law out there that does explain your rationale, that an officer need not conduct a "mini trial" in the streets, once he has arguable probable cause, but there is also plenty of case law out there that explains how officers totally and completely lacked arguable probable in the streets because of how they had attempted to ignore plainly exculpatory, non-controversial facts in the streets - facts that are THEIR JOB to collect fairly and appropriately first, before sending something to court. And a lot times, my brother and I aren't even laying out exculpatory "facts" for the cops to weigh for or against in their probable cause determinations, we are usually informing them of ENTIRELY MISSING ELEMENTS TO THEIR CRIMINAL ALLEGATIONS, like for instance the complete lack of being informed FIRST by a business owner before being issued a valid trespassing citation by the cop. (Yeah, this has actually happened. The cop arrested my brother for trespassing without even figuring out if he was not wanted on the property first). The courts have been VERY CLEAR to rule that an officer completely lacks arguable probable if he doesn't even establish what are called "essential" or "critical" elements of an offense. Otherwise, in your world, cops would have free reign to pick up anybody on anything, and could never be wrong, could never be held to any fire, whatsoever, period, nada, zip, zilch, zero! Like I've said before, the bar for probable cause is not THE FLOOR.
I have met DAs and judges and cops and juries and public defenders that have all proven to be absolutely retarded, on dozens of levels, that I would have to for the most part disagree with you. They have all proven in my experience to systematically deny defendants rights, treat them as guilty until proven innocent, not accept their innocence when they prove it, not respect basic rules of law like hearsay, pretend that certain things weren't said, rubber stamping plainly conclusory warrants that lack critical elements to an offense, etc. etc. etc. etc. I have determined that most of the problem lies in a type of yuppie racket / mafia / gang / etc. that nobody (looks like you too) want to admit exists, or perhaps, don't even have access to discovering, because you guys are all stuck seeing the picture from the outside, without the necessary tools / experience / etc. to see it from the inside (like I have been able to). Ultimately, I believe you are all suffering from a form of "statistics fraud" that you certainly won't be able to get out of, because you're stuck on the inside of!
Ahh, the age old argument that "they chose." Yep, they sure did. Because everybody "chooses" to be on the streets. Great way to rationalize an entire group of people that may very well be suffering because of all sorts of things like unequal opportunity, rising costs of living, TORTS committed against them in their past to which they struggle to bounce back from, etc. etc. etc. With all this opportunity around us, all these jobs available, let's just blame the homeless for their own, fully informed bad decisions, and not go up to them and talk to them and figure out what makes them tick, why they "choose" what they do, etc. etc. etc. How many "homeless" people have you spoken to that you claim "choose" to be homeless? Or are you gathering your statistics from a ten foot pole? How do you know that they are indeed *simply* not willing to "put in the effort to go to work every day" (and are otherwise fully capable human beings) and they are not otherwise severely mentally ill people with lack of motivation type of syndromes caused by a life of pain and suffering and unequal opportunity etc. etc. etc. You seem to be pretty far separated from them, as I see many out there, especially with your self admitted 60 hour work weeks. I highly doubt you have collected enough fair and balanced statistics in order to safely start bunching all your city's homeless / transients into one big bucket called "LAZY."
Right, because people just do things that they absolutely know are wrong. Just like me and my kleptomania back in the day. Because people aren't mentally ill, or have been taught the wrong things, or have other psychological problems that cause them to rationalize away their behavior. Tell me something, think of a crime, say, killing your neighbor's dog. You know that's wrong, right? Now tell me that you simply "choose" to not go outside and kill your neighbor's dog, right now. I don't think that's a simple "choice" now is it. If you *truly* know that something is wrong to do, you can't, and won't do it. The opposite is true, I believe, for anybody who commits a crime. Sure, they may think that it's *okay* to do something that *society* has deemed wrong, to which they are aware that society demonizes, but I don't think they truly *know* that it is wrong, like how you and I know that it is wrong -- OTHERWISE THEY PROBABLY WOULDN'T HAVE DONE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE! According to you, I *knew* it was wrong to steal back in the day, but I still did it. How is that even logically possible? But now I don't steal. Why so? What changed? Today, I won't -- I say can't -- steal, because I TRULY know that it is wrong to do. Or maybe I now *care* that it is wrong to do. Or maybe I just learned what tools are necessary to not try and rationalize away such behavior. Go ahead, keep thinking that you could easily kill your neighbor's dog, but that you somehow "choose" not to because you know that it is wrong. I don't think that you are "choosing" not to do it. I think that you have a *more perfect knowledge* that it is wrong, and that YOU WON'T / CAN'T DO SOMETHING THAT YOU TRULY KNOW IS WRONG. So, stop holding people who haven't figured such things out to such an impossible fire. Most (if not all?) people who break the law don't need to be PUNISHED for it, they need to be HELPED for it. They need to be REHABILITATED for it. They just need some serious lesson teaching and a correct ego collapse on the subject. They need somebody to HELP them obtain a more correct world view on the subject. They DO NOT need somebody to ostracize, victim shame, and straight up DEMONIZE them for it.
Okay, let's define what an actual "hate crime" is. According to the FBI's website, a hate crime is defined as a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity."
Now let's look at what Eric Holsapple did (the property manager talked about in my other thread who put up a fence near, but not on, his property, to which he did so without first obtaining a permit to do). He committed:
1) criminal offense (namely, a 23-84 violation of the city's municipal code, which is a classic misdemeanor), and
2) against a person (namely in that case, a group of people, the homeless), to which
3) was motivated in whole or in part by his bias against that group of people.
Here's the complete email chain I obtained between him and the City Of Fort Collins, if you'd like to read it:
Hate Crime Email Chain Between Eric Holsapple And The City Of Fort Collins
Now you may not think that "homeless people" are a protected status of people, but I dare argue that it now is, or has at least now become one, by how people have started stealing land in the name of unlawfully removing said people from said land. So you tell me, jk, is what Eric Holsapple did, NOT A HATE CRIME? Be honest now. I want to know your answer.
Sure, for the 29th Street Mall private drives specifically in question, I don't know *precisely* if they have been declared "public highways" for the purposes enforcing their municipal median code against, but I do know that they are private properties, with signs on them that say "private street, no city maintenance," and that other cops have totally and already given the a-okay for me to be on, and so, I at least have a sneaking suspicion that they are *not* public highways for the purposes of anti-median enforcement. And I have a VERY strong suspicion that the other FIVE private properties that I have been picked up on, claiming that those were all public properties outright, are almost certainly NOT "public highways" whatsoever, to which I have an even stronger suspicion that cops should know their jurisdiction about, in order to not pick people up on with some sort of anti-median ordinance. BTW, so you know, I call in all the time to their police dispatches (including Boulder's) and visit their city zoning, GIS, and city manager's offices (like, a sting, if you will) posing as an anti-abortionist from a church looking to hold a sign on their private drives, of which I always get friendly and consistent answers from them all telling me that I have every right to do, and that they and their police "would never touch me" for doing. So again, nobody wants to admit that there may exist a full subjugation of people (the homeless) now treated as full on second-class citizens, that nobody seems to care about upholding the rights of.
Oh man, are you serious? What "laws" have I broken? Do you see me convicted of ANYTHING yet? What a stretch of the imagination. Just because you think "the cops had probable cause" -- now I'm breaking the law? So far I have 1) jumped a fence from a right of way into a right of way, and have had said trespassing charges dropped because I was charged with trespassing into private property when in fact I was in public property, and 2) held a sign on private property that is difficult to argue is public property for the purposes of enforcing "no median on streets" municipal code ordinances against.
If I turn out to be right on the 29th Street Mall private drives not being considered "public highways" are you then willing to admit that your cops are kidnapping homeless people from perfectly legitimate locations without a lick of lawful justification? It seems like you would just love to keep thinking that it is I who is in the wrong, so that you don't have to hold your cops to the fire. Tell me, jk, and let's be honest, should the cops that night have held Eric Holsapple responsible for violating a 23-84 municipal code misdemeanor violation, or will you continue to forever look the other way on that one?