Mark Elbert was the chief of police for Bellevue, Nebraska. Officers in the Police Department are represented by the Bellevue Police Officers Association (BPOA). Gary Young and the law firm Keating, O’Gara, Nedved & Peter (KONP) represents the BPOA. At a meeting on September 13, 2017, BPOA members discussed Chief Elbert and some of his…
Lieutenant Vincent Benvenuto is a 12-year veteran of the Hartford Police Department in Connecticut. Benvenuto became the target of anonymous commentors to a blog, known as “We The People-Hartford,” maintained and operated by Kevin Brookman. The Blog contains two sections. In the first, Brookman publishes his investigative reports derived from attending Department and City Hall…
In early 2016, Officer Edwin Diaz, a 20-year veteran working in the Narcotics Bureau of the Miami-Dade Police Department (MDPD), became the subject of an internal investigation. The investigation came in the wake of several high-profile arrests of MDPD police officers. The MDPD’s investigators worked in conjunction with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and…
Edwin Diaz is a Miami-Dade Police Officer assigned to the Department’s Narcotics Bureau. On February 26, 2016, Diaz was arrested as part of a sting operation being conducted by the Department, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. The investigation focused on whether Narcotics Bureau officers were stealing money from…
In a case involving Officer Frank Fones of the Montgomery County Police Department, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals began its opinion by writing that “this is, at its core, an employment dispute that seeks an encore as a defamation claim.” Fones served as a canine officer for about twenty years. He was transferred out…
In 1964, the United States Supreme Court published a groundbreaking decision on the law of defamation. In New York Times v. Sullivan, the Court held that the free speech protections of the First Amendment meant that a “public official” could not file a defamation of character (i.e., libel or slander) lawsuit unless the official could…
Public safety employees, particularly law enforcement officers, face almost insurmountable obstacles in suing for defamation of character. Various court-created rules, including the “opinion” and “public official” rules, routinely block lawsuits from ever getting to a jury. Precisely such a thing recently happened in the Kentucky Court of Appeals. Officer Sam Cromity works for the Louisville…
