“The ACLU of Connecticut is suing state police for fabricating retaliatory criminal charges against a protester after troopers were recorded discussing how to trump up charges against him. In what seems like an unlikely stroke of cosmic karma, the recording came about after a camera belonging to the protester, Michael Picard, was illegally seized by a trooper who didn’t know that it was recording and carried it back to his patrol car, where it then captured the troopers’ plotting.” — From ACLU website
“The ACLU of Connecticut is suing the police after they accidentally recorded themselves on a phone they took from a protester as they were trying to come up with charges they could level against him for protesting.” — From AOL News
“The state police internal affairs division is reviewing a video that surfaced recently that appears to show several troopers discussing what charges to levy against a man who was protesting a DUI enforcement checkpoint near Park Road in West Hartford last year. Michael Picard, 27, of East Hartford, was charged with creating a public disturbance and reckless use of the highway for the Sept. 11 incident in which a trooper can be heard saying on a recording of the encounter, ‘We gotta cover our asses.'” — From Hartford Courant
I’m not a fan of open carry, and I think police should get drunks off the roads, but hey, people have a right to protest no matter what their views are. And cops should never, ever, fabricate charges or lie about what people did. That’s tyranny, that’s living in a police state, and we can’t tolerate it. We can’t allow cops to be a law unto themselves. These cops need to go.