Tag: police

Failure To Protect Capitol Raises Serious Questions

Jan. 6, 2020

Two things led to the “siege” of the Capitol building last week.

  1. A group of thugs broke off from an otherwise peaceful protest of hundreds of thousands Trump supporters and forced their way into the Capitol building.
  2. All that stood between the Jan. 6 protesters and the Capitol building were two dozen police officers positioned behind a small portable fence. They weren’t even wearing riot gear.

Two factors led to the “siege” but only one – the demonstration – has received any real attention.  

If authorities had provided the same level of security seen at Black Lives Matter demonstrations last summer, the siege could not have occurred. By failing to provide adequate security, police effectively handed the thugs a key to the building.

President-Elect Joe Biden labelled the difference in security between the June 3 and Jan. 6 protests a symptom of race discrimination and the perception of a greater threat by black protesters. However, the police protected not only the Capitol building but also BLM, which would have suffered a public relations disaster had protesters had broken into the Capitol. It’s message, just like Trump’s concerns about voter fraud, would have been lost.

June 2, 2020

Without the police, BLM’s message about race discrimination – like Trump’s message about election fraud – might have been lost.

Continue reading “Failure To Protect Capitol Raises Serious Questions”

Appeals Court SWATs Free Speech for Police

On the bright side, at least he’s still alive.

A panel of the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco this week reversed a jury verdict in favor of Brian Hagen, a Eugene Oregon police officer who was removed from the  department’s K-9 team after expressing safety concerns following several  instances involving the accidental discharge of weapons by members of the department’s SWAT team.

The panel ruled that a “public employee [who] reports departmental-safety concerns to his or her supervisors pursuant to a duty to do so ….does not speak as a private citizen and is not  entitled to First Amendment Protection.”

After three instances of accidental discharge of weapons by SWAT team officers in two years, one of which resulted in the actual shooting of a SWAT team member, Hagen became concerned about safety issues related to the K-9 team working with the SWAT team.  When he  repeatedly pressed for information about improvements to the SWAT team’s weapons handling, he was transferred from the K-9 team.

After a trial, a jury unanimously agreed that the City  had deprived Hagen of his First Amendment right to free speech under the U.S. Constitution by retaliating against him for expressing safety concerns. The jury awarded Hagen $50,000 in compensatory damages and $200,000 in punitive damages.

A three-judge panel of the appeals court ruled on Dec. 3 that the lower court improperly denied the City’s  motion for Judgment as a Matter of Law. The appeals court reversed the jury verdict, vacated the damages, and remanded the case back to the lower court with instructions to enter judgment in favor of the defendants on each of Hagen’s claims. 

The  appeals court agreed with the City’s  argument that Hagen failed to establish that he spoke as a private citizen, rather than as a police officer who was “required by [the] City and police department to report safety concerns.”

 The appeals court said Hagen was required to express concerns about officer safety internally and within the police chain of command. Therefore, it said, even construing all evidence in Hagen’s favor, Hagen did not act as a private citizen who was  eligible to First Amendment protection.

The case is Hagen v. City of Eugene, Peter Kerns, Jennifer Bills, Thom Eichhorn, No. 12-35492.