Cop stop a guy for what may or may not have been a legitimate reason.  Detains him in cuffs.  Watch the video and see if you can spot where the person being detained assaulted the officer. Didn't see it?  That's because it never happened.

But that's what this cop put on the report.

He got fired.  He appealed but the firing has stood up to the first round of investigation.

He's also being sued.

And finally, he's being charged with writing a false report

Dages is accused of "falsifying the reason for Johnson's detention as well as his actions" and faces up to three years in state prison if convicted. He's slated to be arraigned March 9 at the East County Regional Center in El Cajon

News Article

nothing guys? I'm disappointed!

Well, maybe the cop felt assaulted.  So he wasn't really lying.  Not, like, LYING lying.

Was the guy he was arresting a hippie?  Because that matters too.

Can’t be disrespecting that authority.

OP, you too can embed Youtube videos.  It didn't used to be that way for us freeloaders, but now just click the icon and copy/paste the URL.

testing the theory above

I think he identified as an assault victim.

I think any cop discovered to have intentionally filed a false report should be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible.

No exceptions.

Rule #1 of interacting with cops. No matter how right you may be, don't bow up at one. You may get to try on the bracelets or wind up picking your teeth up off the floor.

Young buck didn't like being "disrespected", the natural response was to puff up and he got bracelets. I did that once at about that guy's age.... Don't do that.

That said, the kid should have been kicked loose. The cop doubled down on the whole thing, lied about it and it cost him his job (and deservedly so).

I 100% agree. I have placed cuffs on officers for that a couple times when I was in I.A..

Lying to hem someone up..he has no honor or integrity, throw him to the wolves.

The moral of the story is stay the fuck away from El Cajon.

"you know why I pushed your hand off me - cause you grabbed me" - Johnson (black guy) at the end of the video

What did Dages falsify regarding the reason for Johnson's detention?

Good, but doesn't happen enough. I hope the officer is also stripped of his certification the way we'd expect a lawyer to be disbarred for betraying the public trust like this. Too often these shitbirds just hop over to another town and get hired again.

Do you think Randy Weaver should have come down the mountain and attended his trial as well, or were the feds justified in attempting sieze him by force?

Cop identifies as an assaultee.  It's all good.

Thank goodness it was only the 1 bad apple out of the group of 6.

ISOLATED incident... The AR15 thin blue line group has assured us over AND OVER these things rarely happen... My money is on the guys girlfriend hacked the video feed and erased the assault footage... There is NO way that good officer lied....  Based on the demeaner and language patterns from the thin blue line in our own forum here IT HAS TO BE THE CASE!

@Atomic_Ferret
The main issue with this is the thread running through your rule for interacting with police is to check your behavior beyond what the law says you have to do.

That's not right.

If the law says a sheriff cannot charge you more than $100 for a permit to carry, then why should you agree to pay $200 if that is what the sheriff tries to demand?

If the law says an officer cannot arrest you for flipping them the middle finger, then why should you agree to never flip off a cop?

You're a free Traveler, why not go down to the hood and call the corner boys slinging dope the "N" word? You have freedom of speech!

It's a poor statement that the best parallel you can come up for cops is gang bangers.  One group is quite obviously breaking the law.

He falsified the reasons for his detention of the individual.  He falsified the details of his actions.

at 1:20 (approximately)  Cop says "I'm talking to you---and you smacked me".  Cuffed man says "nobody smacked you bro"

He then expressed similar denials to the female officer and others, and then followed up with two more denials.

at 5:20 (approximately) office states he is being arrested for "assault on a peace officer" to which he responds "Assault on an officer?!?"  The tone and inflection of his voice is what leads me to place the punctuation I did.  He is clearly expressing that it is outrageous and incorrect.

at 5:40 (approximately) cop say 'yea you are the one that hit men' after which he says 'I didn't hit you bro'

at 6:20 (approximately) he does say 'you know why I pushed your hand off of me, because you grabbed me'

Johnson denying that he did the activity or admitting that he did the activity is weak evidence compared to the video recording where it is shown that he did NOT push the cop's hands off.

Eyewitness testimony is not great testimony, because humans can be influenced in a lot of ways.  One way is that if person say the answer is A and an authority figure says 'no, the answer is B!' enough times many people will eventually switch from giving answer A to answer B.

It's clear to me that someone who says 'I didn't do it' 10 times but then says 'I only did it for reason X' on their 11th time, they are saying that because they are beginning to doubt themselves.  And you know what?  That's not unreasonable to say to yourself 'well if everyone else is saying this I should at least entertain the possibility' and then come up with 'well if I DID do X, then I likely did it for (this reason)'

But all that falls away because

#1 Bodycamera shows no assault

#2 Detention starts when the officer grabs him.  As the reason for detention is that he assaulted the officer, and the officer claimed the assault was pushing away the officer's hands  after the officer grabbed him, that means the given reason for the detention happened after the detention started.  So it can't be the legal reason for the detention.  Barring a legal reason, the detention is illegal.

In all fairness to the AR15 Cops.

A lot of people who drop clues that makes me think they are or were LEOs are now popping into these threads and saying that the cop is wrong.

The number of AR15 cops who come in and blindly back the brother in blue are getting fewer and fewer.  

Now this could all be baseless if I suck at judging who is likely to be/have been LEO, or if the Arfcops still believe all cops are always right but have as a group decided the best tactic is to lie low for a while.  But I am hoping that more of the Arfcops are seeing how terrible some of their brothers actually are and are reconsidering.

Will be interesting to see where this one goes in the long run.

Falsifying a police report should also strip you of qualified immunity.

Nonsequitur. Does not compute.  

Did you mean to post this in a different thread?

The only good thing about that vid was the chickie cop brunette with the big tits.

You just missed it by that >< much, haha!!

Karen's love zero tolerance...........

In your world not condemning a cop based on solely media reports - the same media that almost everyone in GD questions when it comes to guns or politics - is blindly backing the brother in blue.

@feudist

Is it reasonable to be extra careful to avoid lawful but potentially incendiary comments when dealing with a group that is know to have no regard for the law?

Absolutely.

The problem is if that group you are taking about is also the law.

The fact that we have to be as careful around LEOs as we do gangbangers is saying something.

You shouldn't leave your company checkbook out where anyone can grab it.  However, if you can't leave your company checkbook out where your business partner can grab it, you might not want to be in business with that person any longer,


If you can't do legal behavior in front of law enforcement for fear they will break the law...you might want to rethink the entire LEO apparatus.

Because of how you replied, a lot of relevant info is not readily visible.

I stated that the bodycamera shows no assault.  You replied back that bodycams don't capture everything.

bodycameras don't capture everything, but they do capture a lot. What I don't have is the officer's exact statement.  Now, if he claims the 'assault' was that individual kicking him in the ankle - yea that might not have been captured.  But if the cop's claim was that the guy grabbed him, even though we don't see his hands, we do see enough of his shoulders and arms to rule that out.

I stated that the detention started when the officer grabbed the guy's shirt.  And so something that happened after the shirtgrab can't be used for the reason for the detention.

Your reply was that the detention started when the lawful order was given.

My question for you:  Did the lawful order come before or after the grabbing of the shirt?

If it happened first, then yes, but the point still remains.  You can't start a detention and then have the lawful reason for that same detention be something that happened after that detention started.

I'm guessing you'd have a really really really hard time saying that a cop walking up and literally seizing a person by the shirt isn't a seizure.
 

So that's part of the interesting thing - a person's bias can be revealed by when you choose to believe the media and when not to.  Very frequently when there's video of police that looks pretty bad, a lot of arfcoms chime in with 'we clearly aren't seeing all the evidence, the media is lying'.  And yet when there's media reports of a police officer killed, we never hear those same people saying 'I be that cop is really alive - the media lies you know!'

It's good to be skeptical, but you also need to be able to know how much to be skeptical and why.  Often when I am told 'there's got to be more' I will ask 'what could have happened off camera that we can't see that would have justified that'?  Generally there's no reply.  But it's good to keep in mind what things camera footage can't show us.  For instance, is that the person's real name or did they just give the cop a fake one?  Is there a BOLO out for that exact vehicle? Or individual?

If the stop looks baseless to we just immediately assume there must have been a BOLO for the car and it's not just getting reported?  But it's good to think those things through.  If there was a BOLO for that exact vehicle, why hasn't the department released that evidence?

But absolutely, people should be willing to alter their conclusion when more information comes out.

I'm still trying to figure out the relevance of that comment.

First off, I'm really terrible with spelling and grammar, but I'm pretty sure that you are able to make the singular Karen into a plural by adding an s.  I don't think the apostrophe is needed, and I can't make any sense out of the sentence if you are trying to show singular possessive.  I do wonder if Karen still needs to be capitalized when being used as a class of people albeit with a shared proper noun name.

Second, Karens love SUVs.  Karens love chocolate.  Just because Karens love something doesn't mean it's bad.

Third, I'm not sure what zero tolerance you spotted that you were attempting to address with that comment.

Fourth, while I'm generally quite skeptical of zero tolerance, there's some areas where I believe it exists just fine.  I have zero tolerance for adults interacting with a child in a sexual fashion.  I have zero tolerance for genocide.  I have zero tolerance for lying under oath regardless of profession.

If having zero tolerance for lying on an official report in the effort to jail a person makes me a Karen, then I guess I need a new haircut, because I'm sticking with that zero tolerance.

Why do you believe Johnson assaulted Dages?

Because you saw it on Dage's body camera?
Because Johnson said 15 times that he didn't and once said he did it in response to being grabbed?
Because Dage wrote it in his report?

Is officer Dage somehow more trustworthy than other members of that department?

If you believe what officer Dage wrote in his report simply because he's a cop writing a report  - then why don you disbelieve the report of Lt. Biegler who investigated the incident and put in his report that Dages falsified the original report?

(Lt. Biegler is a placeholder, I've requested the report, but it will take at least 10 business days)

From your OP - and you are backpedaling with the part in red.

Based on the info that's been presented we don't know when the detention started.

You will have to explain the backpedaling...I'm not seeing it.  I'm stating that I sure as hell don't see any assault in the body cam, and that makes me think that there probably wasn't any!

Regarding when the detention started - are you saying it's possible for an on duty in uniform officer to walk up and seize a person by the shirt so they aren't free to go -at least not without fighting to break that grasp, and that's NOT a detention?

Pardon my mistake - shouldn't be an apostrophe.

I should have said you sound like a liberal white college student protesting for blm with "you're not anti-racist enough" when you claim cops in GD blindly back their brothers in blue.

Lying on an official report should get fired and charged.  Period.  

Given that this incident in La Mesa happened two days after George Floyd's death I do question the department investigation and have to wonder how much the shitty optics played into the firing/charging.  Maybe the officer truly screwed the pooch and lied through his teeth.

I don't believe I said Johnson assaulted Dages.  I asked what was falsified in the report.

Johnson was doing everything he could to browbeat/badger/race card his way out of going to jail and when he saw that he was actually going to jail he changed tactics.  BTDT too many times.  The linked article said the original detention was for smoking in a prohibited area. That should have been a simple warning but I'm guessing, and it's a guess, that Johnson pretty much told Dage to pound sand/walked away and that's when the video starts.

"...initially contacted for smoking in public". WTF.

Where is that stated in the linked article?

Posting about Qualified Immunity when you have no idea what the word means should be instant death penalty.  Violating policy and law by falsifying a police report, for which you are terminated, generally removes qualified immunity.

Gunna have to play the devils advocate here. What happened before the cop turned on his bodycam?  Why were there so many back up officers on scene already?  That video only shows the last part of the interaction. I call bullshit for less than half of the story. Maybe the cop was assaulted before he called in back up and turned on his camera.

But I could be wrong. I just can’t tell without the entire story.

Taking these two statements in reverse order.

Glad we agree that lying on an official report should get you fired and charged.

Now, it seems that you are simply trying to refute my arguments by calling me names.  You started by calling me a Karen.  now you are calling me a white liberal college student BLMer.  Call me all the names you want. That doesn't actually refute my arguments.

lol

With the clear caveat that when more information comes to light, people can come to new conclusions, but based on the videos and news reports around this instance, do you believe Johnson assaulted Dage?

For the second part, I expect that Johnson does have a checkered past.  He may well have been trying to play the race card.  But he may well have been unfairly targeted and arrested for an action he did not actually do this time which is going to frustrate anybody.  But none of that is relevant.  Regardless of how much of a scumbag Johnson is - that's NO excuse for detaining someone without RAS of a crime.  And that's no excuse for falsifying a police report.  

Regarding the 'smoking'.  That might have been the reason for the contact. Or that might have been the reason given for the contact after the fact when it was time to come up with a cover story.  There are multiple recordings of police doing just that - detaining someone and THEN deciding quite some time later what they were going to give as the reason for the detention.  (I'd love it if we could get to the point where a cop needs to in some way declare what crime he has the RAS for prior to starting the detention).  After all nowhere in the video (which granted is incomplete) is smoking ever mentioned.  If the initial contact was for smoking I'd expect a conversation along the lines of 'why you detaining me bro!'  to get a response of 'I detained you for smoking in public, I told you to sit down, you kept on standing up and hit me, so now I'm arresting you for assaulting me, had you just stayed seated you'd have gotten a ticket for smoking now you are going to jail'

POP'ing someone can bite you in the ass.