cops
Smile, you’re on dashcam!
Jan 9th
Folks, it’s 2012. We should all assume that we’re being videotaped by someone when we’re out in public. Especially if you’re a public servant. Most often, the videotaping is going to be done by the police. They’ve had these nifty things called video cameras mounted on dashboards of police cruisers for, like, ever now. They built an entire show – Cops – around it. I mean, seriously, this isn’t some new invention.
So you’d think that the last person to do something stupid that could be caught on a dashcam would be the officer in whose car that same dashcam was mounted and operating. You’d be so, so wrong:
The video, obtained by Lance Goode and his attorney/public defender as part of discovery purports to show an officer dropping what looks like a bag filled with a white substance and then kicking it out of sight while Goode is inside his home entertaining other officers. Goode is then charged with possession of oxy:
Goode said he was not able to find a valid insurance card so he went looking for it in the residence while [Officer Timothy] Henderson followed. [K-9 Officer Roger] Newton, in the video, circles the car, waving a flashlight inside Goode’s car before returning to his cruiser.
Goode said the officers told him they would tow the vehicle and Goode gave an officer his key. The officers allowed Goode to take his possessions out of the car before they towed it, Goode said.
In the video, Goode opens the trunk and removes several items that he takes into a house, with Henderson following.
Newton, Goode said, can be seen in the video dropping a plastic bag filled with white pills. Newton looks around, Goode said, before kicking the bag behind two trash cans.
A minute or so later, a third cruiser pulls up, at which point Goode is arrested and put into the back of a cruiser.
It took a year, but Goode’s case was nolled and Newton has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.
DOJ finds widespread racial profiling in East Haven
Dec 31st
the land of steady racism
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about the town of East Haven, CT hurtling towards “sundown town” status, caused largely by alleged institutional racism and bias towards minorities – lately specifically Latinos. In that post, I mentioned that there was a federal civil rights lawsuit pending and that the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice had opened an investigation into these alleged discriminatory practices of the East Haven Police Department. This past week, the DOJ issued its report in the form of a letter [PDF] sent to the East Haven mayor and boy is it damning (media coverage here).
Some of its key findings:
- The East Haven Police Department (EHPD) conducted disproportionate traffic stops of Latinos. Latinos accounted for 24.8% of the stops in the 4pm-12am shift, which is typically the busiest. The numbers for the other shifts were 17.8% and 14.7%.
- However, comparing the percentage of Latinos stopped to the percentage of Latinos in the population reveals a starker difference. Latinos accounted for 19.9% of all traffic stops, but make up only 8.3% of East Haven drivers (and 15.5% of East Haven and surrounding towns).
In making these stops, the DOJ found that the EHPD targets Latino drivers and employs tactics not used against non-Latinos:
- Officers heavily patrol known Latino areas, lying in wait for people leaving predominantly Latino-oriented businesses.
- Other methods use include following cars until a traffic violation occurs, out-of-state license plates known to be “forged”, citing speeding but writing little to no information about the speeding on the ticket itself.
- Latinos face harsher treatment after being stopped: they are more likely to be arrested and have their cars towed for traffic violations than non-Latinos.
The DOJ further charges that the EHPD haphazardly employes immigration policies against Latino drivers and points out that the EHPD and East Haven have had a long standing problem with policing of minorities, citing a recently concluded federal lawsuit which alleged discrimination against African Americans (Jones v. Town of East Haven, et. al.).
The most shocking thing about all of this (or the least surprising, depending on how naive you are) is that the DOJ got all the above information from the EHPD itself: from 2 years’ worth of police reports and interviews with officers and community members.
The institutional coddling of these discriminatory practices is mind-blowing. From the news report:
East Haven may be unique, if only because of a tangle of politics and the close friendship between East Haven’s Republican mayor, Joseph Maturo Jr. and his chief of police, Leonard Gallo.
Maturo was originally mayor from 1997 to 2007 and he hired Gallo as chief in 1998. But Gallo was put on administrative leave by Maturo’s Democratic successor as mayor, April Capone, in 2010, a result of the allegations of racial profiling and excessive use of force by East Haven Police.
After Maturo won in the November elections, he almost immediately returned Gallo to full duty as chief — an astounding move given the ongoing civil rights and grand jury investigations into police actions during Gallo’s tenure.
And more:
The 23-page report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division cited top police officers for “creating and condoning a hostile and intimidating environment for anyone seeking to provide relevant information in this investigation.”
“We also learned that Chief Gallo had warned staff that the Department of Justice had agreed to provide him with the names of individuals who cooperated with the investigation,” according to the civil rights report. And that, federal officials insisted, was completely and utterly untrue.
How bizarre is this institutional protection? EHPD officers told DOJ officials (that’s the fucking Federal Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, in case we were unclear) that the DOJ officials’ safety could not be guaranteed by the EHPD when they went on ride-alongs. Ponder that for a second.
The DOJ found an abject lack of any internal policing mechanisms and that the EHPD hadn’t ever bothered to compile the statistics to see if racial profiling existed with its department, something that’s required by C.G.S. 54-1m. In addition, the DOJ noted that a large number of entries into the EHPD’s database seemed to be missing ethnicity data or the data seemed to be misreported.
EHPD is at a crossroads: either admit that there are problems and work toward fixing them or deny it all and face lengthy and costly lawsuits brought not only by civilians, but also the Department of Justice. As a new year dawns, one can only hope that concern for the safety of officers and the constitutional rights of its residents rises above deep-seated racism and pride.
Legally carrying a weapon is a crime
Aug 18th
wait, does that count as Arson?
Look, I dislike guns. I dislike them a lot. I don’t believe that people kill people, rather that guns – the objects from which projectiles are discharged at a high rate of velocity, thereby permitting them to enter the bodies of individuals, causing fatal damage to bodily organs – kill people. I’d rather there weren’t any, or at the very least, we had stringent gun control laws.
But do you know what I dislike more? Stupid laws and even stupider interpretation of laws that criminalize perfectly legal conduct. Somehow, despite my strict personal opposition to guns, it is still legal to carry a licensed firearm in Connecticut. In public. Openly.
Yet, for some reason, the state’s “top criminal justice official” – a made up title if I ever heard one – wouldn’t recommend it. Why, you might logically ask, is it not a good idea? For the same reason that photographers across the country are being arrested for videotaping police encounters with civilians: because no one knows the law (see also this post by Balko on an issue similar to the one in the instant post).
I’m not making this shit up.
Mike Lawlor, already featured in one post today for his sage legal prognostications, offers up another:
“In almost every situation you can imagine this happening in, it qualifies as breach of peace,” he said. “If you walk into a restaurant with a gun it’s almost by definition a breach of peace.”
That results in an arrest and sets in motion a chain of events that usually results in the revocation of an issued pistol permit, he said. And that’s the way it should be, Lawlor said. Anyone who walks into a McDonalds plainly carrying a firearm either intends to alarm people or is irresponsible, he said.
“Almost by definition”? Oh, really? Challenge Accepted! Here‘s the relevant Breach of Peace statute:
The Barney Fife exception: all in good faith
Aug 15th
The Constitution requires that criminal defendants be provided with a fair trial, not merely a “good faith” try at a fair trial. Respondent here, by what may have been nothing more than police ineptitude, was denied the opportunity to present a full defense. That ineptitude, however, deprived respondent of his guaranteed right to due process of law.
Those, of course, are the (somewhat) famous opening lines to Justice Blackmun‘s dissent in Arizona v. Youngblood, which held that in order to affect due process of law, law enforcement’s actions in destroying potentially exculpatory evidence must be caused by some “bad faith”. The Court, of course, never explains “bad faith”, which results in a race to the bottom to designate all police misconduct as “incompetence” and “inadvertence”, thereby circumventing the Fourteenth Amendment.
Consider, for your entertainment, the very recent case of Martin v. The State of (Where Else?) Texas. In Martin, the defendant was pulled over by Deputy Fife Jennings for failing to signal a left turn. Upon approaching the vehicle, the Deputy smelled “marihuana” and then observed a furtive gesture which led to a patdown, which led to the Deputy feel something like a razor blade (wait for it) which led to the discovery of marihuana methamphetamine (don’t even ask). Martin, within two weeks of his arrest, sent a subpoena to the police department, asking them preserve the video of the dashboard camera. A year later, at the suppression hearing, there obviously was no video, or I wouldn’t be writing this post. Here’s a summary of the police procedure and operation of the dashcam:
The dashcam is automatically activated when an officer turns on his emergency lights. Department policy states that all video must automatically be saved for thirty days. Jennings could not say whether his machine was operating that night, but he would have noted either at the beginning or end of the shift if the device had not been functional. Jennings stated that the only way to know for sure if the video had been taken would have been if he had preserved the video.
And why did no one know if there was video and why did Jennings not preserve it to find out if the incident had been videotaped? I’ll let him tell you:
Aaron Swartz is the new Lori Drew: The TOS misadventures
Jul 19th
If the Federal government were on Twitter or Facebook (or even that shiny new toy Google+), they’d be the confused old grandfather who’s elated that he’s won the Australian lottery even though his clearly smarter – and younger – wife quizzically asks him if he’s every been to Australia.
The Feds continued their misadventures in Terms of Service land with an indictment handed down today against Aaron Swartz, disputed co-founder of Reddit, the less well known bastard child of Digg.
His crime – described by his acts, not the silly US Code that they’re charging him with (PDF) – is essentially downloading staggering amounts of documents from JSTOR, the online repository of the ivory tower’s pontifications and musings on the life of the bourgeoisie. Seriously. Have you ever tried download anything from JSTOR? Apart from being so damn counter-intuitive, that shit is expensive. So expensive that some universities are charged $50,000 a year for access to the hallowed writings scanned and uploaded to JSTOR.
Swartz, someone whom the Feds have had their eye on for a while, basically used spoofed MAC addresses, guest accounts and the like to get behind their paywall and just download all their files. What was he going to do with it? Who the hell knows. But he did it because he hates paywalls and believes in freedom of information and free dissemination of that information. Or something. Watch out, NYT, you’re next.
This, that and the other
Jun 20th
Here are some stories that are deserving of more attention than 140 characters provides, but not interesting enough to get me to write a whole post about them:
- In what is reminiscent of the plot of an O’Henry short story or an article on snopes.com, a man robs a bank, asking for only $1, so he can be arrested and spend a few years in jail. His logic?
That’s right. James Verone says he has no medical insurance. He has a growth of some sort on his chest, two ruptured disks and a problem with his left foot. He is 59 years old and with no job and a depleted bank account. He thought jail was the best place he could go for medical care and a roof over his head. Verone is hoping for a three-year sentence.
- Connecticut judges agreed to allow cameras in all Judicial District criminal courtrooms starting in January:
Beginning in January, cameras and recording devices will be allowed at criminal court hearings in the state’s 13 judicial districts. Whether a proceeding may be televised or recorded will be up to the discretion of the judge in the courtroom. Cameras will be prohibited from courtrooms in which the proceedings involve a sexual assault or a juvenile defendant.
Connecticut’s Commission on Child Protection – deep in the red – folds and its responsibilities will now be shouldered by the Public Defender’s Office:
The state agency that pays private lawyers to represent poor parents and children in child-protection cases has run up such a gaping deficit and owes the lawyers so much money that the agency has been abolished; its work will be folded into the public defenders’ office starting July 1.
Nearly 200 private lawyers are owed as much as $2.4 million by the Commission on Child Protection – which had overspent its budget by $3.8 million at one point late last year. That was the largest deficit, by percent of budget, of any agency of state government.
Most of the lawyers devote at least 80 percent of their practice to this work, which includes defending parents who face losing custody of their children in neglect cases brought by the Department of Children and Families. The lawyers, who also represent children in court, haven’t been paid since October or November in many cases.
- Yet another story – this time from CA – that reiterates the inordinate cost of the death penalty:
Taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since it was reinstated in 1978, or about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since then, according to a comprehensive analysis of the death penalty’s costs.
The study’s authors, U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur L. Alarcon and Loyola Law School professor Paula M. Mitchell, also forecast that the tab for maintaining the death penalty will climb to $9 billion by 2030, when San Quentin’s death row will have swollen to well over 1,000.
Among their findings to be published next weekin the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review:
The state’s 714 death row prisoners cost $184 million more per year than those sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A death penalty prosecution costs up to 20 times as much as a life-without-parole case.
The least expensive death penalty trial costs $1.1 million more than the most expensive life-without-parole case.
Jury selection in a capital case runs three to four weeks longer and costs $200,000 more than in life-without-parole cases.
The state pays up to $300,000 for attorneys to represent each capital inmate on appeal.
- Police corruption has “forced” prosecutors in the Bay Area to dismiss over 800 criminal prosecutions in the last year:
Bay Area prosecutors have been forced to dismiss more than 800 criminal cases in the past year because of allegations of police corruption that include selling drug evidence, conducting unlawful searches and conspiring to get men drunk and then arrest them on drunk-driving charges.
In some cases, defense lawyers found that security-camera videos in residential hotels—showing police making drug arrests—apparently contradicted the officers’ sworn statements.
In one case, a suspect was seen in a video of his arrest wearing a different jacket from the one the officers entered into evidence.
Last year, the San Francisco district attorney dismissed about 700 criminal cases after a drug crime-lab worker was accused of stealing evidence. This year, since March, the district attorney has dismissed about 125 cases, mainly felony drug prosecutions.
- An interesting opinion from SCOTUS today, in Turner v. Rogers [pdf], holding that while the Constitution does not guarantee the provision of counsel in civil contempt cases where incarceration is a possibility, the Due Process clause mandates certain procedural safeguards before a person may be imprisoned after being held in contempt.
And you say I don’t post anymore.
King of my castle
May 17th
Much ink has been spilled over yesterday’s SCOTUS decision in Kentucky v. King, holding that lawful police conduct that may or may not give rise to exigent circumstances does not fall within the scope of the exclusionary rule, so I’m not going to repeat what’s been said. Instead, I make the two obvious pop culture references:
You can thank me later.
Arrest warrant for judge rejected…if it existed in the first place
Mar 29th
Updating the humdinger of a story from last Friday, wherein a State Trooper was allegedly seeking an arrest warrant for a judge who failed to sign an arrest warrant, there are two conflicting sets of stories out today. First, we have the Waterbury Republican-American, which reports that the trooper did indeed submit an arrest warrant application, but it was rejected (by whom, we don’t know), and that now the Chief State’s Attorney’s Office is “reviewing the allegations” that were made in that application:
A state trooper’s arrest warrant application that charges a Bantam Superior Court judge with coercion and hindering an investigation has been rejected, but the allegations it raises have been forwarded to the Chief State’s Attorney’s Office for review. … On Friday, state police spokesman Lt. J. Paul Vance declined to say why the application was denied or by whom. Vance said the document, stamped in bold with the words “arrest warrant application” at the top, is not considered an application for arrest unless and until it is signed by the investigating trooper and a supervisor.
BUT then we turn to the Register-Citizen, which has a different story. According to the R-C, no warrant was ever submitted by any police agency to any prosecuting authority:
State police want to arrest judge who refused to sign arrest warrant
Mar 25th
Unless the victim was also arrested. You can’t make this shit up. And if it were April 1st today, I might laugh it off as a clever joke. But it’s not and apparently neither is this.
Here’s the lowdown, from the two meager paywall inhibited articles that I could find. State Trooper from Salisbury, CT (where watching paint dry is exciting) Mark Lauretano apparently submitted an arrest warrant for a man who got into a bar fight with someone else. The “victim” of the fight (meaning the guy who got beaten up worse), was obviously not arrested, as these things go. Judge Klatt, upon reviewing the information in the warrant declined to sign it, apparently until the “victim” was also arrested.
Judge Klatt, a former prosecutor from Death Valley Waterbury, CT, should have known better. You simply do not refuse the State Police what they want. So instead of, I don’t know, reviewing the information again to see if maybe the Judge had a point, Lauretano does the logical thing and is now seeking an arrest warrant for the Judge herself*.
Because, you know – no, actually I don’t know. He claims that:
“Watch this! Cuff him up”
Sep 30th
Well, let’s take this New Haven police officer at his word and “watch this”:
Quinnipiac student arrested after filming another student’s arrest from The Quinnipiac Chronicle on Vimeo.
If only someone had the technical know-how to turn that first 16 seconds into a repeating GIF and set it to music, it’d surely become the latest meme.
But all dancing cop jokes aside, this is yet another example of the burgeoning battle between officers and the public’s right to videotape their interactions with law enforcement. A recent example that I blogged about is now no longer facing criminal charges. In CT, it still is legal to videotape interactions between the police and citizens in public (but still illegal to record conversations between private individuals without consent).
In this case, it seems the videotaping escalated the incident from a ticket to an arrest:
According to multiple witnesses, within minutes of Hartford beginning to film a Quinnipiac student being arrested outside of Toad’s Place in New Haven, an officer tackled and handcuffed him. Hartford was charged with Disorderly Conduct and Interfering with a Police Investigation. He went on to spend the night in jail at 24 Union Avenue.
Was he truly interfering and being a douche, or just an aware citizen trying to catch the ordeal on camera is up to you to decide. What’s clear is that officers were uncomfortable from the get-go with the presence of the camera (look at the officer on the right and how he looks so awkward, just standing there).
“As soon as I took out the camera they were uncomfortable because they knew what they were doing was wrong,” Hartford [the student, not the city] said.
Quinnipiac senior Kevin Hillier saw the whole incident, and thought that the officers’ response was unwarranted.
“They claimed [Hartford] taking the video of the arrest was interfering with their interrogation when they arrested him, but the only reason him filming was an issue was because they made a big deal out of it,” Hillier said. “If the police didn’t start dancing in front of the camera and yelling at him, there would be no interference.”
The video taken by Hartford appears to show that the officers only arrested the original student because Hartford began filming. One officer, who began dancing when the camera was turned on, looked into the camera and said, “Watch this.” He then asked the student who they were questioning whether he was with Hartford. When the student replied yes, the officer turned to another officer and said, “Cuff him up.”
Okay, fine, I lied. Someone chop up this clip and send it to ytmnd.com ASAP.
Another state police lab under scrutiny
Aug 9th
North Carolina, step right up:
This series [by the newspaper Newsobserver], the product of months of reporting, reveals problems far beyond blood analysis. It shows an agency that teaches its agents and laboratory analysts to line up with prosecutors’ case theories. In some cases, they ignore or twist key pieces of evidence. In others, rogue agents range far beyond the rules, sometimes with devastating results.
The newspaper plans to “reveal” new stories every few days or so. This should be fun.
Gun-waving cop has right to privacy
Aug 2nd
is that a gun in your hand or are you just happy to see me?
This incident occurred back in April, but is back in the news with an ACLU press release. The ACLU is representing Anthony Graber…well, you know what? Just watch:
That’s Graber, on the motorbike, and that’s Joseph David Uhler, gun-waving, taking-too-long-to-identify-himself, plain-clothed, unmarked-car-driving, off-duty, state police officer.
Graber got a ticket for speeding, which he gladly accepted, but was then subject to some Apple Gestapo tactics, with police getting a warrant to search his home and seize his computers.
He’s charged with illegally recording the conversation he had with the officer in public and thus violating the officer’s right to have a private conversation while waving a gun at a suspect and yelling at him on the offramp of an exit off the major interstate in the country, which is nonsense code for cops are above the law. Plus the fact that there’s a damn video camera stuck to the guy’s helmet.
Popehat (and the multitude of comments) covered this back in April, with an in-depth analysis. I won’t repeat it here, but I’ll give you this extract:
Allegedly, Graber is being charged with “interception of an oral communication” under Maryland’s “wiretap” law, Md. Cts. & Jud. Proc. §10-402. The law makes it a felony to “intercept” with an “electronic device,” in this case the microphone attached to Graber’s prominent helmet camera, an oral communication in private conversation.
But that isn’t what Graber’s really being prosecuted for. He’s being prosecuted for contempt of cop. For embarrassing a cop. A cop, and a department, that richly deserve the embarrassment they’ve gotten, and the embarrassment they’re going to receive.
Because the charge against Graber is utterly unfounded. The definition of “oral communication” under Maryland’s wiretap law requires that the conversation be “private,” which is to say that it must be one in which the party being recorded has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Fearnow v. C & P Telephone Co., 104 Md. App. 1, 33, 655 A.2d 1 (1995), aff’d, 342 Md. 363, 676 A.2d 65 (1996). According to the Maryland Attorney General’s office, it is not a crime to record a very public conversation, such as a political party meeting, even in secret.
It seems that Graber is not alone in this. Here‘s another recent arrest for the same charge, also in Maryland. Of course, law enforcement types are always good for some lulz:
Remarkably, the state Attorney General has already opined that when police record in public, that is not a private conversation subject to the same laws. In other words, in any public interaction between a police officer and a member of the public in Maryland, it is private for one of them but not the other.
I know most law enforcement agencies are opposed to videotaping interrogations, but this is a little ridiculous.
Change blindness and the fallacy of the all-remembering cop
Jun 13th
Change blindness is a visual perception phenomenon in which the human mind fails to detect pretty significant changes in our surroundings and distorts our memory.
The most recent famous example of change blindness and its relative, inattentional blindness, is the “count the passes” experiment, which I’m sure everyone’s heard of by now (read the NYT review of their book on the subject). What that illustrates is that when our mind is focused on one task, we zero in on it at the expense of most things around it. For the criminal defense lawyer and the criminal justice system, this is a particularly troublesome issue.
Eyewitness misidentification has become the number one cause of false convictions and it’s easy to “see” how. During a particularly stressful event, when combined with weapons focus, the human mind zeroes in on one thing and pretends to see the others. It fills in the gaps as it were and it is on this peripheral vision that faces are remembered and convictions are obtained.
But there’s a problem with remembering faces. Look at this video:
Paying for injustice
May 18th
Meet Manuel Hidalgo Rodriguez, arrested and convicted in 1995 for child sexual assault that he did not commit. Hidalgo spent 5 years out of a 5 1/2 year sentence before his conviction was reversed and the charges dismissed.
Meet Thomas White, also convicted for child sexual assault and who also spent 5 years in prison before a third jury finally acquitted him in 2005.
But Hidalgo and White have more in common that merely being falsely accused of terrible crimes for which they both spent long years in harsh conditions in prison. Both convictions were obtained by a failure of the system: in Hidalgo’s case, aided by the complete inexperience of his defense attorney in what amounted to a constructive denial of counsel; in White’s, horrifying misconduct by the police and prosecutors to hide exculpatory evidence.
Pretextual trespass
May 3rd
In an effort to combat drug crime in “minority high crime neighborhoods”, police long ago adopted the “pretextual stop”, which was later condoned by SCOTUS in Whren. In Whren, Scalia wrote:
Not only have we never held, outside the context of inventory search or administrative inspection (discussed above), that an officer’s motive invalidates objectively justifiable behavior under the Fourth Amendment; but we have repeatedly held and asserted the contrary. In United States v. Villamonte-Marquez, 462 U. S. 579, 584, n. 3 (1983), we held that an otherwise valid warrantless boarding of a vessel by customs officials was not rendered invalid “because the customs officers were accompanied by a Louisiana state policeman, and were following an informant’s tip that a vessel in the ship channel was thought to be carrying marihuana.” We flatly dismissed the idea that an ulterior motive might serve to strip the agents of their legal justification. In United States v. Robinson, 414 U. S. 218 (1973), we held that a traffic-violation arrest (of the sort here) would not be rendered invalid by the fact that it was “a mere pretext for a narcotics search,” id., at 221, n. 1; and that a lawful postarrest search of the person would not be rendered invalid by the fact that it was not motivated by the officer-safety concern that justifies such searches, see id., at 236. See also Gustafson v. Florida, 414 U. S. 260, 266 (1973). And in Scott v. United States, 436 U. S. 128, 138 (1978), in rejecting the contention that wiretap evidence was subject to exclusion because the agents conducting the tap had failed to make any effort to comply with the statutory requirement that unauthorized acquisitions be minimized, we said that “[s]ubjective intent alone . . . does not make otherwise lawful conduct illegal or unconstitutional.” We described Robinson as having established that “the fact that the officer does not have the state of mind which is hypothecated by the reasons which provide the legal justification for the officer’s action does not invalidate the action taken as long as the circumstances, viewed objectively, justify that action.” 436 U. S., at 136, 138.
While the pretextual stop is almost exclusively thought of in the motor vehicle context (what with it being a stop and all…), I recently came across the use of a pretext to police drug activity in the non motor vehicle area. [A Lexis search for trespass and Whren and trespass and pretext yielded no meaningful results. Yes, I am that much of a nerd.]
Apparently, police departments in some parts of the state have taken to entering into “criminal trespass agreements” (or some such variation: the public defender I got this from wasn’t entirely clear so blame him, not me). What this essentially means is this: the property owner will enter into a contract with the police department, giving them permission to enforce the criminal trespass statutes. The property owner then provides the police department with a list of the properties and the names of all the residents in those locations. There may or may not be signs to that effect posted on the property.
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