A newly-released video is showing a handcuffed black man being tazed and eventually dying. The man, Lynwood Lambert Jr., was arrested for causing a disturbance and then ended up being electrocuted and dying.  Watch the video below.

State Rep. Nick Collins said he wants to prevent public scrutiny of all internal investigations of alleged police brutality or misconduct even after an investigation is finished.

Recently a Medford police officer resigned after threatening to put a bullet in the head of a motorist going around a rotary in the wrong direction.

Requests for his record found multiple past suspensions for misconduct.

But Collins said an officer’s credibility in future cases also can be jeopardized.

“They can be discredited during that process when information is being sought about their personnel files while a case is ongoing,” Collins said.

Collins’ bill would keep all internal investigations private — even after the investigation has concluded.

First amendment advocates said this is the wrong message to send police.

“It tells (police) if you’re accused by a citizen of using excessive force, if you’re accused by a citizen of abusing your authority, don’t worry, we’ll keep it under wraps,” said First Amendment media attorney Jeff Pyle. “That is not a good way to discourage police abuse.”

In the age of cellphone videos it’s impossible to keep misconduct under wraps.

Ferguson, Cleveland and Medford are examples of how the public already is skeptical of most police departments policing themselves.

“Which is a big level of trust,” Secretary of State William Galvin said. “We certainly have the right to review how they’ve used that level of trust.”

NewsCenter 5’s Janet Wu asked Collins if the public should be able to know what happened during the course of an investigation.

“Well that’s a conversation we can continue having,” he said. “Again, this bill is starting point. Nothing’s passed. It’s going through the process.”

Collins’ bill is now before the Judiciary Committee and is not expected to go to the floor of the House for a vote until next year, if then.

He said it will not be thrown in with a group of bills requiring more disclosure of other public records.

A Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Police officer is under investigation after a video surfaced on Friday showing him hitting an unarmed black woman with a baton and pointing his gun at witnesses. The officer, whose name has not been released, is black. He has been placed on administrative leave.

The incident happened aboard Bus #15 in Boston. The video, which was posted to Facebook by activist group Mass Action Against Police Brutality, begins with the officer hitting the woman with his baton. She grabs it to stop the beating, amid cries from witnesses for the officer to stop. When three women approach to ask the officer to leave the woman alone, he points his gun at them and the passengers flee to the other end of the bus. The young woman attempts to get away from the officer, who repeatedly yells “back up” and “shut the fuck up.” The crowd in turn yells, “Drop the gun” and tells the woman to calm down. When backup arrives, another officer points his gun at the passengers and tells them to get off the bus. After the woman is cuffed, the witnesses yell that one of the officers is pulling her hair. The action is not visible on the video, which by then was being shot through the bus window.

According to audio of a statement from MBTA Lieutenant Richard Sullivan that plays in the second half of the video, the woman had been identified as someone involved in a theft and she did not comply when the officer told her to get off the bus. “If you saw the video in the beginning, the officer asks that woman to step off the bus so he can conduct an investigation. She refused to do so, and became actively non-compliant and assaultive,” he said. That conversation does not appear on the video.

Sullivan goes on to say that the unidentified transit cop is a well-respected veteran officer. He declined to comment on the officer’s use of force or his decision to draw his gun on the passengers. “It wouldn’t be fair or appropriate for me to comment on the actions that took place within the bus because, like I said, it’s going to be investigated,” he said.

The video is below.

(H/t ThinkProgess)

Two days after Boston Police Commissioner William Evans’ announced he was implementing a body camera pilot program, local civil rights groups have released a policy proposal for the technology.

The proposed policy outlines protocols for how officers should operate body cameras as well as how police departments should store video footage, make data available to the public and enforce the policy.

The ACLU of Massachusetts, the NAACP in Boston and the Boston Police Camera Action Team (BPCAT) say they applaud the Boston Police Department’s move to implement body cameras. The groups joined together to release a proposed policy Thursday that they hope will serve as a “model policy” for police departments across the state.

“The locations where they have adopted body-worn cameras, there has been a significant decline in complaints about police abuse,” said Rahsaan Hall, the director of the ACLU’s racial justice program. “So we’d want to see if that holds true for Massachusetts.”

Hall, who helped craft the proposed policy, said the main objective was to address privacy, transparency and accountability.

The privacy issue in particular also raises many questions about surveillance and civil rights — all core issues the ACLU works to protect. But body cameras seem to be a special case for the organization, which is pushing for the technology to be adopted.

“We’re certainly concerned with privacy rights; it’s a hallmark of our organization,” Hall said. “We’re also concerned with due process rights and equal protection rights and to the extent that those rights are violated by law enforcement. We want to be able to show that. We want to be able to prove that. We want to be able to provide redress for that.”

The proposed policy calls on officers to activate the cameras (both audio and video) whenever they respond to a call or are conducting an investigation, and to leave them on until an encounter was over. The policy also says officers should notify people when they are being recorded and in some cases ask the person if they want to be recorded — for example, before entering a private residence without a warrant, when interacting with a victim or when a person is trying to report a crime anonymously.

The proposed policy would prohibit officers from using body cameras for surveillance or recording activity that is unrelated to an investigation.

“We don’t want people just taped when they’re exercising their free speech right or freedom of expression or their right to organize or freedom of assembly,” Hall said.

The policy would also ban the use of body cameras in elementary or secondary schools unless responding to an imminent threat to life. It also says video that is improperly gathered must be destroyed immediately.

The proposal calls on police departments to store body camera footage for six months before permanently deleting it. In some instances, departments would have to store videos for at least three years — for example, if there was any use of force, a complaint is filed about the encounter or for felony level crimes. Video would also have to be stored for at least three years if an officer or subject of a body camera video requests it. Body camera video could also be made public through a public records request or for law enforcement purposes under the proposal.

Enforcement of these protocols would fall to the police departments under the proposal. The proposal says those who fail to comply with the policy should face “appropriate disciplinary action.” That would need to be determined by the management structure and disciplinary measures already in place at police departments, Hall said.

“This is a framework for them to use to contemplate how to use the body-worn cameras,” Hall said.

Local activists have been raising the issue of bringing body cameras to Boston since last year. The ACLU recommended using the technology last fall after a report found blacks were disproportionately stopped by Boston officers. Last month, the Boston City Council also took up the issue.

Commissioner Evans said earlier this week that he hopes to have the first body cameras on Boston police officers “within the next couple of months.” Mayor Marty Walsh supports the pilot program and said body cameras “could be a valuable investment in our police force.” In a statement Thursday, the mayor’s spokeswoman Bonnie McGilpin said Walsh “looks forward to reviewing the ACLU’s proposal.”

In a phone interview, police spokeswoman Officer Rachel McGuire said the department is aware of the ACLU’s proposal and Commissioner Evans will be taking suggestions as he moves ahead with the pilot program.

“We’re not just going to take the ACLU’s policy and implement that,” McGuire said. “It’s a suggestion and the commissioner will take it into consideration.”

Body cameras became part of a national dialogue on police-community relations in the wake of Ferguson and other high profile cases where unarmed black men were killed by police.

Many believe body cameras would provide greater transparency, improve community relations and help resolve conflicting accounts of police encounters. But the technology also raises concerns about privacy, costs, data storage, policy and logistics.

Cities across the country have already launched body camera pilot programs — including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle and Washington, D.C. And in Massachusetts, a few cities are testing them out, including Worcester, Springfield, Methuen,Abington and Gill. Lowell police and State Police are also looking into the technology.

Khairullozhon Matanov is a 24-year-old former cab driver from Quincy, Massachusetts. The night of the Boston Marathon bombings, he ate dinner with Tamerlan and Dhzokhar Tsarnaev at a kebob restaurant in Somerville. Four days later Matanov saw photographs of his friends listed as suspects in the bombings on the CNN and FBI websites. Later that day he went to the local police. He told them that he knew the Tsarnaev brothers and that they’d had dinner together that week, but he lied about whose idea it was to have dinner, lied about when exactly he had looked at the Tsarnaevs’ photos on the Internet, lied about whether Tamerlan lived with his wife and daughter, and lied about when he and Tamerlan had last prayed together. Matanov likely lied to distance himself from the brothers or to cover up his own jihadist sympathies—or maybe he was just confused.

Then Matanov went home and cleared his Internet browser history.

Matanov continued to live in Quincy for over a year after the bombings. During this time the FBI tracked him with a drone-like surveillance plane that made loops around Quincy, disturbing residents. The feds finally arrested and indicted him in May 2014. They never alleged that Matanov was involved in the bombings or that he knew about them beforehand, but they charged him with four counts of obstruction of justice. There were three counts for making false statements based on the aforementioned lies and—remarkably—one count for destroying “any record, document or tangible object” with intent to obstruct a federal investigation. This last charge was for deleting videos on his computer that may have demonstrated his own terrorist sympathies and for clearing his browser history.

Matanov faced the possibility of decades in prison—twenty years for the records-destruction charge alone.

Federal prosecutors charged Matanov for destroying records under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law enacted by Congress in the wake of the Enron scandal. The law was, in part, intended to prohibit corporations under federal investigation from shredding incriminating documents. But since Sarbanes-Oxley was passed in 2002  federal prosecutors have applied the law to a wider range of activities. A police officer in Colorado who falsified a report to cover up a brutality case was convicted under the act, as was a woman in Illinois who destroyed her boyfriend’s child pornography.

Prosecutors are able to apply the law broadly because they do not have to show that the person deleting evidence knew there was an investigation underway. In other words, a person could theoretically be charged under Sarbanes-Oxley for deleting her dealer’s number from her phone even if she were unaware that the feds were getting a search warrant to find her marijuana. The application of the law to digital data has been particularly far-reaching because this type of information is so easy to delete. Deleting digital data can inadvertently occur in normal computer use, and often does.

In 2010 David Kernell, a University of Tennessee student, was convicted under Sarbanes-Oxley after he deleted digital records that showed he had obtained access to Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account. Using publicly available information, Kernell answered security questions that allowed him to reset Palin’s Yahoo password to “popcorn.” He downloaded information from Palin’s account, including photographs, and posted the new password online. He then deleted digital information that may have made it easier for federal investigators to find him. Like Matanov, he cleared the cache on his Internet browser. He also uninstalled Firefox, ran a disk defragmentation program to reorganize and clean up his hard drive, and deleted a series of images that he had downloaded from the account. For entering Palin’s e-mail, he was eventually convicted of misdemeanor unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and felony destruction of records under Sarbanes-Oxley. In January 2012, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit found that Kernell’s awareness of a potential investigation into his conduct was enough to uphold the felony charge.

At the time Kernell took steps to clean his computer, he does not appear to have known that there was any investigation into his conduct. Regardless, the government felt that they were entitled to that data, and the court agreed that Kernell was legally required to have preserved it.

Hanni Fakhoury, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the feds’ broad interpretation of Sarbanes-Oxley in the digital age is part of a wider trend: federal agents’ feeling “entitled” to digital data.

Fakhoury compares the broad application of Sarbanes-Oxley in the digital realm to the federal government’s resistance to cellphone companies that want to sell encrypted phones that would prevent law enforcement from being able to access users’ data. When the new encrypted iPhone came out, FBI Director James Comey told reporters that he didn’t understand why companies would “market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.”

“At its core,” Fakhoury says, “what the government is saying is, ‘We have to create a mechanism that allows everybody’s [cellphone] data to be open for inspection on the off-chance that one day in the future, for whatever random circumstance, we need to see that data.'”

Similarly, Fakhoury says the government’s underlying theory in cases like Kernell’s is, “Don’t even think about deleting anything that may be harmful to you, because we may come after you at some point in the future for some unforeseen reason and we want to be able to have access to that data. And if we don’t have access to that data, we’re going to slap an obstruction charge that has as 20-year maximum on you.”

As more and more data are stored online, the government wants and believes it deserves access to that data for policing purposes. But Fakhoury disagrees.

“The idea that you have to create a record of where you’ve gone or open all your cupboards all the time and leave your front door unlocked and available for law enforcement inspection at any time is not the country we have established for ourselves more than 200 years ago.”

This past February the Supreme Court somewhat narrowed the scope of Sarbanes-Oxley in the case of Yates v. United States. The feds had charged a commercial fishing captain under the same record-destruction law for throwing a batch of undersized fish overboard after a federal agent had instructed him not to. The Court ruled that applying Sarbanes-Oxley to the dumping of fish was too far afield from the law’s original corporate-crime purpose. Another Tsarnaev associate, Azamat Tazhayakov, who helped throw Tsarnaev’s backpack full of fireworks into a dumpster, may see his conviction overturned because of the Yates decision.

But it appears that, at least for now, cases like Matanov’s and Kernell’s are still fair game. The Supreme Court did not answer the pressing question of how broadly federal prosecutors are allowed to use Sarbanes-Oxley in the digital age. Can you be prosecuted for deleting a potentially incriminating tweet? For uninstalling Firefox? For clearing your browser history? How much of their digital data should citizens have to preserve in case law enforcement wants to take a look?

In March, Matanov pleaded guilty to all four counts of obstruction of justice. When he entered his plea, he told Judge William G. Young that he maintains his innocence but fears a decades-long sentence were he to go to trial. His plea agreement with prosecutors calls for a 30-month sentence—still a harsh punishment for little more than deleting videos and clearing his browser history. Matanov’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for June.

“The whole case is mystery,” Matanov has said. The “FBI is trying to destroy my life.”