Friday, July 23, 2010

The San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Department needs to clean house

Apparently starting at the top.
When San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Murphy responded to a “shots fired” call in April 2008, he decided en route that he was going to make an arrest.

He did far more than that. Murphy and other deputies made an unwarranted entry into a home, and then into a locked gun safe. Murphy's uncensored, darkly disturbing observations and behavior following his Code-3 arrival at the rural home of longtime SLO County resident Matt Hart were picked up by Murphy's and other deputies’ own recorders. Those recordings provide a rare, frighteningly revealing, behind-the-scenes perspective of how one local law enforcement agency views the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and other laws its personnel are sworn to uphold.

Sheriff’s spinner Rob Bryn declined to confirm the identities of any of the deputies appearing or heard in the recordings, or to discuss any aspect of the Hart home invasion. So we've done that for you. (Bryn, ever the public servant, eventually stopped responding to e-mails from a KCCN.tv reporter.)
It's a long video. You get to hear the Sheriff and deputies deciding what bullshit they'll use to justify what they're doing; a perfect example of "I have a badge, and I can do anything I want. And make up any reason I think I need to excuse it."

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