Law Professor and Journalist collborate to hold police accountable for actions

“I think this will be our Ferguson.”

Sitting in his office at the University of Chicago Law School just over a year ago, attorney and professor Craig Futterman was talking about a video almost no one had seen. It was a dashboard-camera recording of a white Chicago police officer killing a black teenager.

The details, then still unconfirmed, rang with an ominous echo of the police shooting of Michael Brown, whose death in a Missouri street sparked weeks of protest.

Futterman, who runs the university’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, hadn’t seen the video yet either; but he’d been pushing the city to make it public for months, ever since a confidential source had called and described it to him. “An execution,” Futterman’s source had called it. He searched for his own words. Finally he said simply, “This kid, his name is Laquan McDonald.”

Article here (via abajournal). 

Police body cameras are important, says DOJ

The DOJ said it had expected to award only 50 grants and added another $2.5 million to meet the increased demand when requests soared. An additional $3.9 million has been allocated for training, technical assistance, and a study to analyze the effectiveness of the program.

Instead, the DOJ awarded  19.3 million dollars. Article here, (via aba journal).

Lawsuit in Federal court alleges East Lansing officers maliciously prosecuted MSU student

The incident involving Justin Socha happened in September 2010, the night after a football game between MSU and Notre Dame.
According to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids: Officers Jeffrey Thomas and Anthony Fuller were investigating a house and ordered Socha and a friend to convince the residents to come outside.

After spending at least 25 minutes knocking on the home’s front and back doors without a response, the officers told Socha and his friend to sweep up broken glass in the street, the complaint says.

The officers then “intimidated” Socha and his friend and “coerced” them into spreading the glass in the parking lot outside the house, behind vehicle tires, the complaint says.

Upon returning to the home, Socha was charged with urinating in public, a disorderly conduct charge, but eventually was found not guilty by a jury.