Zeros of MN Law Enforcement

If you think the Minnesota "law enforcement officers" suspected of violating privacy by looking up people in the driver's license database are creepy, you'll really appreciate some of the other things that Minnesota law enforcement officials (cops and prosecutors) have been accused and/or convicted of recently:

St. Paul cop and Minnesota police union leader Jeffrey Rothecker already was nominated on this site for his poor judgment in relation to the Anne Rasmusson data privacy violations. Since then, he's also advocated numerous times for citizens to violate the law and given them strategies for avoiding prosecution for doing so. That's not what law enforcement officers are typically expected to do, which merits his additional inclusion in this section.

Minneapolis cop Steven Lecy gets a nomination for his willingness to victimize those who he's supposed to be in the business of helping to save. I guess at some point people are going to have to decide whether prostitutes are criminals or victims. If it's the latter, Lecy is more of a perpetrator than a savior. In the meantime, he's helped allow "criminals" to go free.

Mark Laine of the Cloquet police department was called someone who "made [a] career out of saving others" when he died in a head-on collision in March 2015 in a crash that also killed a local nurse. Unfortunately, Laine was driving the wrong way in his lane, wasn't wearing a seat belt, and had a blood alcohol level of about twice the legal limit. Laine apparently didn't learn a lesson from his previous DUI. It's tempting to wonder how many times his fellow cops looked the other way when they saw Laine weaving his way back home drunk to Saginaw.

Metro Transit cop Daniel Wallace has a curious notion of the amount of force necessary and appropriate to cite an alleged fare jumper. A quick review of the video should self-splain his presence in this section and those included here on similar grounds are likely to grow as citizens capture the routinely excessive use of force by many police. 

William Jacobs, the former chief of the Minneapolis Park Police, has pled guilty to three counts of criminal sexual conduct and possession of child pornography. He was arrested in 2010 for abusing a teenager at his home and having over 40,000 child porn images. He allegedly molested dozens of children over decades of abuse and is now serving a lengthy prison sentence.

John Paul St. Marie, a former assistant Hennepin County attorney, has been convicted of operating a prostitution ring in addition to multiple follow-up sexual offenses in violation of his parole for which he was finally sentenced to incarceration in a prison medical unit. His most recent probation violation involved viewing pornography on the Internet. As a former prosecutor, he's clearly a Class A hypocrite, but if jerking off to online porn is the worst thing the guy is now doing, it seems benign enough to let go. Do they really think most guys don't do this?

Speaking of hypocrites and prosecutors, it's tough to beat the case of Grand Marais-area prosecutor Tim Scannell. Here's a guy who hounds a guy on statutory rape charges to the point where he eventually shoots up a courtroom and shortly afterward dies after being denied medical treatment in jail. So how does Scannell follow up his success: by pursuing a minor to the point where her family has to file a restraining order against him. You'd also think exposure of that offense would be enough to shame the guy into resigning, but no, there have been public demonstrations against him for months in Cook County and he still refuses to resign.

(Former) Robbinsdale police chief Steven Smith saw his law enforcement career come to an abrupt end in March 2014 when he tendered his resignation a month after being arrested in a prostitution raid in Coon Rapids. You'd think that with all of the law enforcement attention being given to "sex trafficking" in the Twin Cities, he'd know better. Hopefully, every one involved in that raid was functioning in their own free will.

Former "highly decorated" Minneapolis SWAT cop David Clifford has been sentenced to 43 months in prison for a felony assault conviction after nearly killing and causing ongoing brain damage to a fellow bar patron in Andover last year. The veteran of a failed SWAT drug raid that cost Minneapolis a six-figure settlement for burning a woman's leg to the bone, Clifford apparently forgot that he doesn't get a pass for off-duty conduct. At his sentencing, Clifford admitted as much saying, "It turns out I never took off my uniform... I decided to be a cop when no police intervention was necessary." Apparently, that means he thinks that sucker punching people is a job for an on-duty cop. If I were him I'd have been taking martial arts lessons over the past year because his new homies may not be too thrilled with how he treats people.

Minneapolis cop Lucas Peterson. Sheesh, enough said. How much money do Minneapolis taxpayers have to cough up and how many people have to die before somebody realizes he's a problem? Also, what exactly do you have to do to win awards and commendations as a cop? To be referred to as a "model cop"? Is it based on the number of citizen you beat or kill or something? Two words: police unions. Peterson also is implicated in the Anne Marie Rasmusson allegations detailed elsewhere in this site.

Christopher William Woodis and Christopher J. Bennett are among the many Minneapolis cops recently identified as having racist or homophobic tendencies, but these two have gone above and beyond by having been convicted of disorderly conduct for their role in a Februrary 2013 bar fight with racial overtones.

Now that he's been fired, former St. Paul cop Matthew Gorans may now realize that it's never appropriate to deliberately pepper-spray somebody in the ear or pull them by the hair, especially if you're already on a short leash due to previous misconduct charges. Or maybe not. The St. Paul police union thinks this paragon of civic virtue deserves his job back and is suing the city for releasing the video showing Goran's misconduct. 

The police union also apparently thinks that 30 days without pay is too much for St. Paul cop Jesse Zilge for kicking a man laying face down on the ground. Even though Zilge has numerous previous misconduct allegations as well.

Former Maplewood cop Kevin Coffey was fired from his job for, among other things, making sexual advances toward, false allegations against, and offering to buy alcohol for a 19 year old. The city claims that he turned off recording equipment in his squad car. Why is this even possible? His police union...of course...contested his dismissal.

Former Minneapolis officer Bradley James Schnickel has been accused of sexual misconduct with at least 20 juvenile women in Anoka and Hennepin counties. As a bonus, he's also accused of creeping on some of his victims by obtain private data from the Minnesota databases as are the cops listed elsewhere in this site.

Former Minnesota State Patrol trooper Nick Morse pled guilty to careless driving for driving drunk...to a State Patrol training session. Stay classy, troopers!

Hutchinson cop Karl Willers admitted to giving marijuana to Occupy Wall Street protesters and allowing them to smoke it in the back seat of a squad car as part of a police training exercise. Willers received immunity from prosecution as part of a commonly used mechanism called a "Garrity warning" where fellow police and internal affairs investigators can prevent charges from being filed against them in exchange for providing information about an incident.