Law-enforcement links from Radley Balko

Radley Balko posts links in the Washington Post. Here arethose posted this morning:

• Yet more shady dealings from police and prosecutors in Dothan, Ala.

• Pennsylvania prosecutors drop murder charges against two former death-row inmates who have protested their innocence for decades.

• Problems arise when police are asked to investigate alleged domestic violence by fellow police officers.

• From the “watching the watchers” files: New crowdsourced project aims to track how police collect and use data from social media sites.

• Video appears to show off-duty Texas police officers shooting a man as he was walking away. They were apparently looking for robbery suspects. The man wasn’t implicated in the robbery.

• Incredible Justice Department report finds brazen and systemic police abuse in Louisiana. Officers in two departments made hundreds of “secret” arrests without probable cause. The arrests typically included strip-searches, and arrestees could be held for days without access to a lawyer. Most were based on little more than an officer’s hunch, after which the arrestee would be pressured to confess.

• Here’s an interesting look at some positive prison reform developments in Idaho.

• Los Angeles is considering a law that would ban childless adults from city playgrounds. Ridiculous as this sounds, it’s apparently already the law in New York City.

• Federal government finally admits what we’ve known all along — it has been vastly undercounting the number of people killed by police.