"Jury awards more than $2 million to family of pastor killed by narcotics task force"

Edited to add link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/02/23/jury-awards-more-than-2-million-to-family-of-pastor-killed-by-narcotics-task-force/

In September 2009, the young pastor Ayers was ministering to a young woman whom a Georgia drug task force was investigating on drug charges. (She had allegedly sold an undercover officer $50 worth of cocaine.) When task force members saw Ayers alone in the car with the woman, they switched their focus to him. According to Ayers’s lawsuit, the woman was about to be evicted from the motel at which she was staying. Ayers gave her the $23 in his pocket to help cover her rent.

The task force followed Ayers to a convenience store, where he went in to get money from an ATM. When he returned and got into his car they pounced. They pulled up behind him in an unmarked black SUV. Armed agents dressed in street clothes then rushed Ayers’s car. He put his car in reverse and attempted to escape. In the process, he nicked one agent. Another then opened fire, killing him. Ayers told hospital staff was that he thought he was being robbed. His reported last words were, “Who shot me?”

Ayers had no drugs in his car or in his system, and there was no evidence he was using or distributing anything illegal. Still, local law enforcement officials tried to smear him. They first said he was part of their drug investigation all along, then retracted. The woman the police were following initially said in an interview that Ayers was counseling her and helping her kick her drug habit. Later, while facing criminal charges for a separate incident, she changed her story and claimed that Ayers had been paying her for sex.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) reviewed the incident and concluded that the narcotics officers had done nothing wrong. Investigators basically blamed Ayers for his own killing, stating that he (a) should have known the narcotics agents were police, and (b) may have been attempting to flee to avoid embarrassment if it were revealed to the public that he had paid for sex. The police say Ayers should have known the task force agents were law enforcement because of the badges around their neck.

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Last week, a federal jury awarded Abigail Ayers $2.3 million in her lawsuit...

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There's a whole lot of police misbehavior I had to leave out. Read the whole article for more.

Cops get away with murder, but the taxpayers pay for it.

We need a national commission on law enforcement standards and practices.