Mountain View Resident Harrassed and Falsely Arrested By Police

http://Mediafilter.org/guest/Pages/September.1.1999.07.00.25

This Event Happened in Mountain View, Califddornia.
ppp-206-170-6-234.rdcy01.pacbell.net.

I am writing in reference to case number 99-016969 dated March 25, 1999. Officer Schlarb arrested me in my living room at home on Rock Avenue for felony possession of a controlled substance. Officers were originally dispatched to my residence to serve a traffic warrant on me. When asked about my identification by the officers on scene, I told my roommate to retrieve my checkbook from the glove compartment of his vehicle, as we had been out with friends the evening before. As he went to retrieve it, Officer Schlarb told my roommate he would get the checkbook himself. Without permission, Schlarb and/or Barcelona entered the vehicle and opened the glove box, retrieved the checkbook and proceeded to search the vehicle without consent of my roommate, the registered owner. During this illegal search, a ten-dollar bill containing a bag of a methamphetamine was found. The ten-dollar bill was apparently in the center console ashtray beneath the armrest, obviously not in plain view. Schlarb then returned to the living room where I was sitting on the living room floor handcuffed, and asked if I wanted my money. I said yes, thinking he was speaking about $ 23.00 that was in the glove box that was mine. He apparently was speaking about the $ 10.00 bill. Based on my answer he charged me with the crime of possession. A few days ago I went in for my arraignment. Upon examination of the police report , I was shocked to see that there were several inaccuracies. These inaccuracies serve to strengthen Schlarbs case and border on being flat out lies. The inaccuracies are as follows: 1) Schlarb states that I asked PD to retrieve my property from my vehicle. I did no such thing. I asked my roommate to retrieve my checkbook and money from the glove compartment of his vehicle, not PD. 2) Schlarb states that the vehicle was a seized BMW. At which point was it seized? 3) Schlarb states that the ten-dollar bill was retrieved and the drugs discovered only after retrieving my checkbook and asking me if I wanted my money. He makes it appear that he returned to retrieve the money upon my request and with my permission and that was when the drugs were discovered. My roommate states that the ten dollars and my checkbook were retrieved at the same time from different places in the car without his consent, prior to my being asked if I wanted my money. Do you think that if I knew that there were drugs in that car, or if they were my drugs, I would direct the police right to them? (This is the person that hid in the attic hoping to avoid arrest - I would not invite further trouble and increased charges upon myself!) When I spoke to my public defender he stated that the jury would certainly believe the testimony of a police officer over my roommates or mine, and encouraged me to plead guilty. Though, the public defender may be right, I refused, as I am not guilty. As to why Officer Schlarb has such dislike for me, I can only speculate. Perhaps the following would shed some light onto why Officer Schlarb may be somewhat disgruntled with me. Officer Schlarb and I had a run in together at Lucky when I was working there as a loss prevention agent. A uniformed security officer and I had taken a transient into custody for trespassing, loitering and smoking and possessing marijuana in the rear of the Luckys on Rengstorff. Schlarb arrived with other officers and advised me that possession of marijuana was an infraction and that I couldnt arrest someone for it. I argued that possession is a misdemeanor, and that since it had occurred in my presence, the security officer and I were justified in taking the transient into custody. Officer Schlarb did not take kindly to that and became upset. After a brief argument, he advised me that in the future I should wait for PD arrival, prior to making contact. I agreed that that would have been the best course of action and said that I would do so in the future. Then the day he and other officers arrived to serve the warrant, he was angry that I wasted his time and placed him and other officers in a more dangerous situation by hiding in the attic. Officer Schlarb demonstrated his frustration by handcuffing me very tightly. In front of my roommate and other officers, I asked Schlarb to loosen the cuffs or to double lock them, so they didnt tighten anymore. He refused. When I asked for a cup of water, he refused to allow my roommate to bring me one. It was only after Schlarb left the room to search the BMW, did one of the younger officers loosen and double lock my cuffs. Two officers transported me to the station. I knew these officers from prior contacts at Lucky when they assisted me or provided back up when I had made citizens arrests on shoplifters. They warned me that I lived in Schlarbs beat and that I should be careful whenever I drive as he may pull me over for any reason. Upon arrival at the station, and completion of my pre-booking, Schlarb placed me in the rear of his patrol car in order to transport me to the jail. He failed to fasten my seatbelt and proceeded to drive quickly, taking turns in a manner that caused me to slide back and forth in the rear of the patrol car. I do not know if this was intentional, but I had no doubt in my mind that Officer Schlarb had a personal grudge against me. On July 13, 1999, at approximately 1430 hours, my roommate and I were at Costco in the parking lot walking towards my roommates car, when we saw Officer Schlarb look at us as he drove by in his patrol car. I told my roommate about what the young officers had said about Schlarb pulling me over and advised my roommate to drive extra carefully. Moments later as we got on the on ramp for northbound 101, Officer Schlarb pulled up behind us and pulled my roommate over. I have not seen Officer Schlarb since that time. I am writing to you in the hope that you conduct your own inquiry into the true facts of the case. I hope you can uncover the truth and see the facts of the case without any bias. I am not out to destroy Officer Schlarb or bring ill repute to him or to the MVPD, or to sue for damages or anything like that. I simply want justice. As of today, I am looking to move out of Mountain View and Santa Clara County, in part out of fear of suffering repercussions in response to this letter. THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES BY FORMER SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA POLICE CHIEF JOSEPH MCNAMARA MAY BE OF INTEREST TO ALL ACCESSING THIS SITE. Has the Drug War Created an Officer Liars' Club? By Joseph D. McNamara Los Angeles Times - February 11, 1996 Are the nation's police officers a bunch of congenital liars? Not many people took defense attorney Alan M. Dershowitz seriously when he charged that Los Angeles cops are taught to lie at the birth of their careers at the Police Academy. But as someone who spent 35 years wearing a police uniform, I've come to believe that hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests. These are not cops who take bribes or commit other crimes. Other than routinely lying, they are law-abiding and dedicated. They don't feel lying under oath is wrong because politicians tell them they are engaged in a "holy war" fighting evil. Then, too, the "enemy" these mostly white cops are testifying against are poor blacks and Latinos. The federal government reports that more than 1.3 million drug arrests were made in 1994, 480,000 of which involved marijuana. About 1 million of the total drug arrests were for possession, not selling. Despite government drug-war propaganda that big-time dealers are its targets, only 24% of the total drug arrests were for selling. Almost all those arrested for selling are small-timers, in large part, supporting their own drug use. Often they are inveigled by undercover police to up the ante. Many of the arrests for selling are made without search warrants and almost all the possession arrests are without warrants. In other words, hundreds of thousands of police officers swear under oath that the drugs were in plain view or that the defendant gave consent to a search. This may happen occasionally but it defies belief that so many drug users are careless enough to leave illegal drugs where the police can see them or so dumb as to give cops consent to search them when they possess drugs. But without this kind of police testimony. the evidence would be excluded under a 1961 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Mapp vs. Ohio. I became a New York City policeman five years before the Mapp decision. We were trained to search people who appeared suspicious. I questioned the apparent contradiction posed by the 4th Amendment, which guaranteed that people would be secure in their person and house from a search without a warrant. The instructor said not to worry. A suspect could sue in a civil action but no jury would find against a cop trying to stop dope from being sold. He went on to say that if the courts really meant it, they wouldn't allow such evidence into a criminal trial. In its Mapp decision, the Supreme Court cited this police attitude and the routine violations of the 4th Amendment as reasons enough to establish a national rule to exclude illegally obtained evidence. Gradually, as police professionalization increased, police testimony became more honest. But the trend reversed in 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon declared a war against drugs and promised the nation that drug abuse would soon vanish. Succeeding presidents and Congresses repeated this false pledge despite evidence that drug use, drug profits, and drug violence increased regardless of expanded enforcement and harsher penalties. Because the political rhetoric described a holy war in which evil had to be defeated, questioning police tactics was equivalent to supporting drug abuse. Leaders of the drug war dehumanize their "enemy"-not just foreign drug traffickers but also American users. This mentality pushes the police into making ever more arrests. Arrests that can only survive in court because of perjured police testimony. The fact that enforcement falls most heavily on people of color also encourages illegal police tactics. Non-whites are arrested at four to five times the rates whites are arrested for drug crimes, regardless of the fact that 80% of drug crimes are committed by whites. The "war" dehumanizes the cops as well as those they pursue. The eroding integrity of law-enforcement officers and the resulting decrease in public credibility are costs of the drug war yet to be acknowledged. Within the last few years, police departments in Los Angeles, Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco, Denver, New York and in other large cities have suffered scandals involving police personnel lying under oath about drug evidence. Some officers in the New York City police and New York State police departments were convicted of falsifying drug evidence. Yet, President Bill Clinton appointed the heads of those agencies to be drug czar and chief of the Drug Enforcement Agency, respectively, and they were confirmed in the Senate. The message that politicians seem to be sending to the nation's police chiefs is that we understand that police perjury is a part of the drug war. But recently a number of police leaders have conceded that racially disparate arrest rates and illegal police searches and testimony are a problem. Last year, for example, New York Police Commissioner William J. Bratton warned his officers not to lie about how they obtained evidence, saying that he would rather they lose the case than commit perjury. Last month, Baltimore Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier ordered his cops to stop arresting drug users and to concentrate on criminals committing gun crimes and other violence. The vast majority of police forces are still being pushed into waging a war against drugs by politicians who ignore history and mislead the public into believing such a war can be won. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of illegal police searches take place and are lied about in court while drug-war hawks pontificate about the immorality of people putting certain kinds of chemicals into their bloodstream. America's Plague of Bad Cops By Joseph D. McNamara Los Angeles Times - September 17, 1995 Citizens are having trouble distinguishing the good guys from the bad. Retired LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman spouts venomous racism and brags to an aspiring screenwriter about torturing, beating and framing suspects. Cops across the country. murder people, pull armed robberies while in uniform, sell dope, steal drug-buy money, shake down criminals, accept bribes and falsify evidence against criminal defendants. The standard defense coming from law enforcement is that only a relative handful of the 400,000 cops nationwide go bad. For several reasons, the public is not reassured. First, the number of reported cases of bad cops is rising. Some L.A. County deputy sheriffs get caught robbing and extorting money from drug dealers. In New Orleans, a uniformed cop is accused of murdering her partner and shop owners during a robbery committed while she was on patrol. In Washington, D.C., and in Atlanta, cops in drug stings are arrested for stealing and taking bribes. In Boston, two white cops frame a black man for murdering a white woman. New York State troopers falsify evidence that sends people to prison. In San Francisco, counterfeit evidence means hundreds of drug convictions are likely to be overturned. Similar evidence tampering forces the prosecution to reopen many cases in Philadelphia. It's not just the rank and file, either. The former police chief of Detroit is in prison for stealing drug-buy money. In a small New England town. the chief steals drugs from the evidence locker for his own use. A number of Southern sheriffs are convicted of being in league with drug smugglers. Agencies thought to be untouchable are suddenly reaping as many bad headlines as the perennially troubled New York City Police Department. The Drug Enforcement agent who arrested Panama's Gen. Manuel Noriega on drug- trafficking charges is in jail for stealing laundered drug money. The FBI catches one of its agents taking drugs from the evidence stockpile and trying to market them to regional drug dealers. Of course, police corruption is not new. The heritage of cops in America includes corruption, racism, and abuse of power for political purposes. The urban police forces started in the 1840s followed the.orders of political machines like Tammany Hall. Aficionados of Raymond Chandler's private eye, Philip Marlowe, will recall his good luck in encountering an occasional honest cop as he roamed Southern California in the 1930s. Ironically, it was the LAPD-whose recent problems have amplified police departments'- sins nationwide-under the leadership of William IL Parker, that first gained its freedom from politics to become a professional force. One, of the fundamental problems of American policing is the conflict between law-enforcement duties and maintaining order in the streets. For example, the Los Angeles Police Department is probably the most arrest-happy department in the country. By contrast, cops in other cities send drunks home, overlook minor violations and seek to keep the streets calm without resorting to arrest. Also, the L.APD, as well as other police forces, maintain control by aggressively policing minority communities. Resisters are taught a lesson and, if necessary, punished physically, especially if they show "contempt of cop". Politicians and officials whose careers depend on tough-on-crime rhetoric are reluctant to ask too many questions about what the cops are doing. Indeed. public fear of crime has made it increasingly difficult for the relatively small number of police chiefs who really care to get civil-service commissions to uphold discipline in their ranks. And the few district attorneys willing to prosecute cops for unnecessary use of force find it difficult to get juries to convict officers, especially when the victim of a police beating is a minority. After all, in a war, you cannot tie your soldiers' hands when the "enemy" is so dangerous. True, American policing has greatly improved since the civil rights movement directed attention to police abuses. But the recent outbreak of bad-cop problems has cost police forces a lot of the credibility they had gained among minority groups with good policing. Still. there is one silver lining in the cloud of distrust created by the Fuhrman tapes and the plethora of police scandals: more self scrutiny. We should not, however, make the mistake of getting lost in debates about such reform mechanisms as civilian-review boards, community policing and special prosecutors. Rather, the essential task is to create within police agencies an incentive to break the code of silence among the rank and file and encourage cops to police themselves. A corrupt, racist or brutal cop will abstain from misconduct only when he looks at the cop next to him and believes that the officer will -blow the whistle if he hits the suspect. The police value system is what permits the kind of behavior that gets bad .headlines. Real reform is possible only when that value system changes and cops come to realize that they must police themselves. For mayors and chiefs, the first step is to stop telling cops they are engaged in war. Next, they and rank-and-file cops must also stop using the "few bad apples" defense to obscure the fact that the code of silence among honest cops is allowing crooked and racist cops to flourish. Finally, leaders should be honest and acknowledge that good cops are now punished, instead of rewarded, if they expose bad cops. Politicians and chiefs must recognize that it is not negative publicity to weed out misfits; it actually demonstrates to the public that it can trust the police to police themselves. Only when the community can tell the good guys from the bad will we be able to get tough on crime. Then, people will report crime to the police, serve as witnesses and, when they sit on a jury, believe police testimony. Justice is not served when juries spend as much time judging the police as determining the guilt or innocence of the person on trial.

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