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Rebecca Kavanagh Profile picture
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29 Jul, 5 tweets, 1 min read
Dallas Police Officer Darrell Cain murdered 12-year-old Santos Rodriguez by playing Russian Roulette.

He served two and a half years in prison and the family has never received a cent of compensation.

Today, the Dallas Police Department said sorry. washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07…
The cops had Santos and his 13-year-old brother David handcuffed in the back of a police car (where they had put them after pulling them from their beds) and were interrogating them over the theft of $8 from a soda vending machine at a gas station.

Neither boy was guilty.
Three years before Cain had killed a Black child and never been charged.
Santos was murdered in 1973, but we all know this sort of police violence against Black and Brown children persists.
This apology serves the PD well because it allows them to pretend they are closing a chapter on something that is as much a part of who they are now as it was then, without doing anything for Santos' family.

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More from @DrRJKavanagh

Rebecca Kavanagh Profile picture
31 Jul
CW: Police violence

Cop on NYC subway station last night slamming a young woman to the ground for allegedly not paying her $2.75 subway fare.

His name is Sergeant John Zorilla of Transit Bureau 4.

From: Instagram: copwatchshawty
An hour later at the Essex St Subway stop he got into a confrontation with someone who had been filming him and ordered them to leave the station.
He then decided it was not enough to get them to leave the station, so he went up to the street, tackled them to the ground, maced them and arrested them. For literally no reason.
Read 6 tweets
Rebecca Kavanagh Profile picture
25 Jul
Sometimes you kinda forget the things that most shocked you when you started as a public defender - there's so many.

For me, I'll never get over that people get charged with drug possession on the basis of their being drug *residue* in things like crack pipes and stems.
The worst case I had where this happened: an elderly Black man whose house the police executed a warrant on. His wife had cancer. They found a stem somewhere that literally he had not used for five years or more because he was sober and they brought him in on it.
They offered a deferred dismissal but didn't accept it because he wanted to get the search warrant materials as part of discovery because hew knew there was *no way* the police had any reason to search his house and he was going to bring a civil suit.
Read 6 tweets
Rebecca Kavanagh Profile picture
25 Jul
No way that Caledonia cop would have thrown away an empty baggie (corner tear).

The most common way police charge drug crimes is through DRUG RESIDUE.

They will find an empty crack pipe or stem and charge people with crack possession even tho they didn't use it for a year.
That's perfectly legal.

They can't tell if if an item has drug residue in it at the scene, they need to test it.

So someone could be arrested for an "empty" corner tear. They then can be held in jail or have bail set and wait until the drug test results come back.
The cop could also have thrown the corner tear in the car purely to give him a pretext to search the car - rather than to arrest the person in it - which he doesn't have on the basis of this stop.

That's just as illegal.
Read 5 tweets
Rebecca Kavanagh Profile picture
11 Jul
Why are news outlets describing this jail as a "floating prison" like it's a restaurant rather than a prison ship that is part of Rikers Island?

nypost.com/2021/07/10/man…
.@ava wrote about it recently. If I were imprisoned there I'd be smashing windows to get out.
But it's interesting that @nypost and other outlets are running with the correctional officers union line that this incident shows how understaffed the jails are and why they need to hire more officers.
Read 5 tweets
Rebecca Kavanagh Profile picture
10 Jul
Police officers should not be a protected class under hate crimes statutes.

sltrib.com/news/2021/07/0…
Hate crimes legislation is supposed to protect the marginalized - the protected classes are based on immutable characteristics not jobs.

Besides there are usually already sentencing enhancements in place when a crime is committed against a police officer.
And like all criminal laws, these sorts of enhancements - and in fact hate crime statutes more generally - end up getting used against the people they are supposed to protect. theappeal.org/a-black-man-ca…
Read 4 tweets
Rebecca Kavanagh Profile picture
28 Jun
Wow. @CNN using a backwards graph that proves the opposite of what it says about violent crime.
To support this.
I'd love to hear @ChrisCuomo explain this one. I mean not really, but why even pretend to have credibility.
Read 4 tweets

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