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A man was stabbed in the neck during a musical festival near the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Saturday night, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The Once Upon A Time in LA music festival was taking place at Exposition Park Saturday night, but the performances ended after the stabbing, the festival announced shortly after 10 p.m.
The man, whose identity has not been released but was described as being about 30 years old, was stabbed at about 8:40 p.m., according to Officer Orris of the LAPD.
The Los Angeles Times, citing a source “with direct knowledge of the incident,” said the victim was rapper Drakeo the Ruler, who was “was attacked by a group of people at the music festival and seriously injured.”
The man was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, according to Margaret Stewart of the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Just when it seemed that Houston’s own Megan Thee Stallion was having the best year ever, the rapper has made more national news. The 26-year-old rap star has entered into an exclusive, First Look deal with streaming juggernaut Netflix, the company announced.
Under the terms of the deal, Megan (née Megan Jovon Ruth Pete) will create and executive produce new series and other projects for Netflix, per a press release.
“I’ve always had a passion for telling creative and entertaining stories, so I’m thrilled about this partnership with Netflix,” Megan said in a statement. “Venturing into production is the next step in my journey as an entrepreneur and I can’t wait to bring all my ideas to life and for my Hotties to watch.”
Entertainment source Datelinenotes that while no details were given about the series that Megan is creating and executive producing, signs point to comedy.
On cue, Netflix’s head of comedy, Tracey Pakosta, added: “Megan is a multi-talented creative force who has consistently made her mark on culture. She’s always growing and evolving as an artist, and we’re thrilled that she’s making a home at Netflix for this next chapter in her journey.”
One could be forgiven for calling 2021 The Year of Megan. After being featured in Time Magazine’s Most Influential People list last year, the three-time Grammy-winner landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit edition this year, secured a deal with Popeye’s to produce “Hottie Sauce” (apropos), and graduated from Texas Southern University with a degree in health administration.
The Netflix deal won’t be Megan’s first foray into the small screen. Deadline adds that Megan has appeared in HBO Max’s reality competition series Legendary and on NBC’s Good Girls and Sarah Cooper’s Netflix comedy special.
CHICAGO -- A 28-year-old man has been charged with a fatal shooting in October in Gresham on the South Side.
Danny Simmons was charged with a felony count of first-degree murder, according to Chicago police. About 8:30 a.m. Oct. 22, 17-year-old Tremayne Maltbia was in the 7800 block of South Wood Street when a blue minivan approached and someone got out and fired shots, police said. The teen was struck several times and was taken to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he was pronounced dead.
Simmons was arrested Friday at O'Hare International Airport, after being identified as the person who allegedly fired the fatal shots, police said. He is due in bond court Saturday.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department found thousands of dollars in cash, drugs and military-style guns when they raided a cannabis dispensary in Florence-Firestone that allegedly had provided narcotics that were smuggled into L.A. County jails, the department announced Friday.
Four people were arrested during the Dec. 9 raid in the 2000 block of East Florence Avenue, the Sheriff’s Department said.
The four people who were arrested were armed with two handguns and two assault rifles that the department described as “ghost guns” — firearms without serial numbers that can be built at home to evade background checks and other licensing requirements. “The assault rifles were fully loaded with military-style tracer rounds,” the department added in a release.
In addition to the guns, authorities seized 1 ounce of methamphetamine, 50 pounds of cannabis and $12,000 in cash, officials added.
The promise was a war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The documents show flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths — and scant accountability.
This is the first part of a series. Part 2 will examine the air war’s human toll.
Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.
In early 2017 in Iraq, an American war plane struck a dark-colored vehicle, believed to be a car bomb, stopped at an intersection in the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul. Actually, the car had been bearing not a bomb but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and their two children, who were fleeing the fighting nearby. They and three other civilians were killed.
In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an “unknown heavy object” into an ISIS “defensive fighting position,” American forces struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. A military review found that the object was actually “a person of small stature” — a child — who died in the strike.
None of these deadly failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing.
These cases are drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of the American air war in the Middle East since 2014.
The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.
The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.
The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”
This was the promise: America’s “extraordinary technology” would allow the military to kill the right people while taking the greatest possible care not to harm the wrong ones.
The ISIS caliphate ultimately crumbled under the weight of American bombing. For years, American air power was crucial to the beleaguered Afghan government’s survival. And as U.S. combat deaths dwindled, the faraway wars, and their civilian tolls, receded from most Americans’ sights and minds.
On occasion, stunning revelations have pierced the silence. A Times investigation found that a Kabul drone strike in August, which American officials said had destroyed a vehicle laden with bombs, had instead killed 10 members of one Afghan family. The Times recently reported that dozens of civilians had been killed in a2019 bombing in Syria that the military had hidden from public view. That strike was ordered by a top-secret strike cell called Talon Anvil that, according to people who worked with it, frequently sidestepped procedures meant to protect civilians. Talon Anvil executed a significant portion of the air war against ISIS in Syria.
The Pentagon regularly publishes bare-bones summaries of civilian casualty incidents, and it recently ordered a new, high-level investigation of the 2019 Syria airstrike. But in the rare cases where failings are publicly acknowledged, they tend to be characterized as unfortunate, unavoidable and uncommon.
In response to questions from The Times, Capt. Bill Urban, the spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, said that “even with the best technology in the world, mistakes do happen, whether based on incomplete information or misinterpretation of the information available. And we try to learn from those mistakes.” He added: “We work diligently to avoid such harm. We investigate each credible instance. And we regret each loss of innocent life.”
He described minimizing the risk of harm to civilians as “a strategic necessity as well as a legal and moral imperative,” driven by the way these casualties are used “to feed the ideological hatred espoused by our enemies in the post 9/11 conflicts and supercharge the recruiting of the next generation of violent extremists.”
Yet what the hidden documents show is that civilians have become the regular collateral casualties of a way of war gone badly wrong.
To understand how this happened, The Times did what military officials admit they have not done: analyzed the casualty assessments in aggregate to discern patterns of failed intelligence, decision-making and execution. It also visited more than 100 casualty sites and interviewed scores of surviving residents and current and former American officials. In the coming days, the second part of this series will trace those journeys through the war zones of Iraq and Syria.
Taken together, the reporting offers the most sweeping, and also the most granular, portrait of how the air war was prosecuted and investigated — and of its civilian toll.
There is no way to determine that full toll, but one thing is certain: It is far higher than the Pentagon has acknowledged. According to the military’s count, 1,417 civilians have died in airstrikes in the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria; since 2018 in Afghanistan, U.S. air operations have killed at least 188 civilians. But The Times’s analysis of the documents found that many allegations of civilian casualties had been summarily discounted, with scant evaluation. And the on-the-ground reporting — involving a sampling of cases dismissed, cases deemed “credible” and, in Afghanistan, cases not included in the trove of Pentagon documents — found hundreds of deaths uncounted.
The war of precision did not promise that civilians would not die. But before a strike is approved, the military must undertake elaborate protocols to estimate and avoid civilian harm; any expected civilian casualties must be proportional to the military advantage gained. And America’s precision bombs are indeed precise: They hit their targets with near-unerring accuracy.
The documents, along with The Times’s ground reporting, illustrate the many, often disastrous ways the military’s predictions of the peril to civilians turn out to be wrong. Their lessons rarely learned, these breakdowns of intelligence and surveillance occur again and again.
Repeatedly the documents point to the psychological phenomenon of “confirmation bias” — the tendency to search for and interpret information in a way that confirms a pre-existing belief. People streaming toward a fresh bombing site were assumed to be ISIS fighters, not civilian rescuers.
Men on motorcycles moving “in formation,” displaying the “signature” of an imminent attack, were just men on motorcycles.
Often, the danger to civilians is lost in the cultural gulf separating American soldiers and the local populace. “No civilian presence” was detected when, in fact, families were sleeping through the days of the Ramadan fast, sheltering inside against the midsummer swelter or gathering in a single house for protection when the fighting intensified.
In many cases, civilians were visible in surveillance footage, but their presence was either not observed by analysts or was not noted in the communications before a strike. In chat logs accompanying some assessments, soldiers can sound as if they are playing video games, in one case expressing glee over getting to fire in an area ostensibly “poppin” with ISIS fighters — without spotting the children in their midst.
The military spokesman, Captain Urban, pointed out that, “In many combat situations, where targeteers face credible threat streams and do not have the luxury of time, the fog of war can lead to decisions that tragically result in civilian harm.”
Indeed, the Pentagon records detail how in Mosul in 2016, three civilians were killed when a bomb aimed at one car instead struck three — in part because the military official approving the strike had decided to save more-precise weapons for other, imminent strikes. Yet The Times’s analysis of the documents and ground reporting showed that civilians were frequently killed in airstrikes planned well in advance.
Military officials often speak of their “over the horizon” long-range surveillance capabilities. But the documents repeatedly identify deficiencies in the quality and quantity of the video footage guiding intelligence.
Sometimes, only seconds’ worth of footage was taken before a strike, hardly enough to assess civilians’ presence. Often video shot from the air does not show people inside buildings, people under foliage, people under the aluminum or tarpaulin covers known as “quamaria” that shield cars and market stalls from the sun.
In more than half of the cases deemed credible by the military, one or two civilians were killed entering the target area after a weapon was fired. Officials often describe these as awful but inescapable accidents. But while many might have been averted through additional precautions — widening the surveillance camera’s field of view or deploying additional drones — the phenomenon continued unabated, amid the intense pace of battle and a shortage of surveillance aircraft.
DC Police Tried to Fire 24 Current Officers for ‘Criminal Offenses.’ A Powerful Panel Blocked Nearly Every One, Documents Show.
Disciplinary files obtained by Reveal and WAMU/DCist show how a panel of high-ranking officers – including the current police chief – kept troubled officers on the force. We need your support to continue delivering our gripping and compassionate work.Donate today.
This story is a collaboration with WAMU/DCist.
The two sex workers in Washington, D.C., suspected that the drunk, bearded man in the silver Nissan Maxima was a police officer. Standing outside the car on a December night in 2015, they could see his black boots and blue cargo pants. Then there was the way he held his gun as he pointed it at them. Exactly how a cop is trained to do, one of the workers thought, according to internal police records.
After they’d called 911 reporting that a belligerent man had solicited sex, threatened one of them with a gun and then accused them of stealing his phone, the Metropolitan Police Department officer dispatched to the scene ran the Nissan’s plates, the documents show. Sure enough, it belonged to Ronald Faunteroy, a fellow MPD officer.
The officer on the scene immediately notified Agent Charles Weeks, a 20-year veteran tasked with investigating his fellow officers. Weeks’ investigative notes suggest he threw himself into the case, seemingly dispelling any notion that there was a buddy-buddy culture within the department that would protect Faunteroy.
That very day, Weeks recorded video interviews with both of the sex workers who interacted with Faunteroy, according to Weeks’ investigative files. In the weeks that followed, he reviewed surveillance footage from two cameras in the area and interviewed every officer involved with the case. He acquired equipment records, incident reports, 911 audio, dispatch logs and property records. He had even photocopied the notebooks of the officers responding at the scene, scouring through their chicken-scratched notes to understand what exactly happened.
He’d pieced it all together. After a grueling two-hour interview, Weeks eventually got Faunteroy to confess. Faunteroy said he’d tried to pay for sex, the records show. After being denied, he’d pointed his MPD-issued Glock at a sex worker. He’d wrongly accused her of stealing his phone. And he’d lied about it all, Weeks later determined.
“You put the puzzle together,” Faunteroy told Weeks at the end of the interview. “You’re right.”
The Metropolitan Police Department swiftly took action, moving to terminate Faunteroy. The Internal Affairs Division determined that “a preponderance of evidence existed to sustain the allegations” that he violated D.C. laws and department policy.
Yet a powerful tribunal of three high-ranking officers, known as the Adverse Action Panel, overruled the department’s decision to fire Faunteroy. The officer in charge of the panel: Robert J. Contee, who has since risen to become chief of police. Faunteroy was stripped of his title of master patrol officer, a high-ranking patrol officer paid extra to “provide effective coaching, mentoring, and guidance to other officers,” but the department roster shows he’s since regained the title.
Internal records show that MPD’s Disciplinary Review Division sought to terminate at least 24 officers currently on the force for criminal misconduct from 2009 to 2019. In all but three of those cases, the records show, the Adverse Action Panel blocked the termination and instead issued much lighter punishment – an average of a 29-day suspension without pay. These officers amassed disciplinary records for domestic violence, DUIs, indecent exposure, sexual solicitation, stalking and more. In several instances, they fled the scenes of their crimes.
The disciplinary files, obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and WAMU/DCist, provide a rare glimpse into how police officers avoid accountability and remain on the force, even after the department’s own internal affairs investigators have determined they committed crimes. The records have never before been made public.
They show:
The department’s internal investigators concluded that at least 64 people who currently serve as MPD officers committed criminal misconduct.
The department sought to terminate 24 of those officers. In 21 of the 24 cases, the Adverse Action Panel reduced their sentence to a suspension or acquittal.
The department did not seek to terminate the other 40 officers, more than half of whom the Internal Affairs Division believed had been driving either drunk or recklessly. Other criminal conduct the department did not try to fire current officers for included recklessly handling a firearm, harassment, property damage, stalking and theft.
“These systems that MPD set up to punish or at least give officers their day in court when they committed an infraction, they don’t really work,” said Ronald Hampton, a retired MPD officer who has advocated for more accountability as a member of the city’s recently created Police Reform Commission. “It’s seated in the culture of the institution; it’s going to take more than setting up more systems within the organization to deal with it.”
Of the 24 criminal misconduct cases, the department believed that at least seven officers had committed domestic assault. All of them stayed on the force, six as a result of the panel’s decision. For instance, in November 2015, a pastor brought a woman to a crisis center to report that she had been repeatedly assaulted by her husband, a current police officer named Bai Bangura, according to the disciplinary files. “I know that he is going to try to kill me if I cause problems at his work,” she wrote in a note at the bottom of paperwork filed at the crisis center. In spite of statements from an internal affairs agent who testified that, based on her years of experience working domestic cases, she believed the victim to be caught up in a cycle of abuse, the panel unanimously agreed to override the department’s attempt to fire the officer. Instead, Bangura was suspended for 10 days and is still an officer with MPD.
Internal records show that MPD’s Disciplinary Review Division sought to terminate at least 24 officers currently on the force for criminal misconduct from 2009 to 2019. In all but three of those cases, the records show, the Adverse Action Panel blocked the termination. Credit: Tyrone Turner/WAMU
Other personnel files show that an internal investigation concluded that Officer Steven Ferris was arrested for simple assault in 2012 after Internal Affairs reported he confessed that he punched his wife so hard that he fractured a bone around her eye socket. Another officer, Jonathan Goodman, allegedly hit two women at a restaurant in 2010; when one of them said she was calling the cops, he pulled out his badge and replied, “Bitch, I am the police,” according to the files.
When one of them said she was calling the cops, he pulled out his badge and replied, “Bitch, I am the police.”
Officer DeVon Goldring allegedly ran over the mother of his child with his white Chevy Tahoe in 2009, according to the files. A hospital report describes black streaks on the inner part of the left side of her foot, ankle and calf: tire marks, an officer on the scene concluded. The department wanted to fire him, but a panel offered him a 21-day suspension instead.
Ultimately, the records show, Bangura’s wife told prosecutors that she didn’t want to pursue charges. Ferris’ wife didn’t cooperate with prosecutors who later brought charges against her husband; he was acquitted. Domestic violence victims are often reluctant to cooperate with prosecutors and internal investigators alike, so their cases can be difficult to prosecute both in criminal and administrative court. Federal law prohibits the purchase and possession of firearms and ammunition by people who have been convicted of domestic violence offenses, and had these officers been convicted in a criminal court, they all would have likely lost their job and their right to possess a gun. These cases were handled administratively; even though the department believed the officers had committed domestic assault, it continued to issue them a firearm.
Neither Contee, the police chief, nor the department would comment on Reveal and WAMU/DCist’s findings. We attempted to reach all of the officers named in this story for comment. Only one responded, Anderson Liriano, whom the department wanted to fire after an internal investigation found that he threatened to kill a sergeant at another police department in 2017. The Adverse Action Panel overruled the department and handed down a 15-day suspension. Liriano wouldn’t comment on the case against him but told Reveal and WAMU/DCist that the entire disciplinary process took too long.
“The way they do it, it’s unprofessional,” Liriano said. “They put you out and make you wait when all the facts are already there.”
Liriano and the other 20 officers remain with MPD today, patrolling the District in possession of MPD-issued firearms and authorized to use deadly force.
The ransomware hack contained thousands of scanned documents that were not readily searchable. Reveal converted those documents to text and searched for files that referenced officers potentially engaged in a “criminal or quasi-criminal offense,” language taken from MPD’s General Orders. We identified 75 cases in which the department investigated a current officer for criminal misconduct. While the Internal Affairs Division investigates officers for possible criminal activity, its decisions are purely administrative within the department; they are not the same as those in a criminal court.
When the department learns of an officer’s potential criminal misconduct, investigators with MPD’s Internal Affairs Division procure court records, conduct interviews and gather scores of pages of documentary evidence. Underdepartment policy, if internal investigators find that an officer has likely committed a crime, whether or not they’ve been convicted in a court of law, the Disciplinary Review Division has the authority to recommend that they be removed from the force. Facing dismissal, accused officers may formally appeal their terminations to the Adverse Action Panel, a rotating three-person board made up of other officers typically holding the rank of captain or higher.
D.C. isn’t alone. Many law enforcement agencies have some version of this system, typically known as trial boards. Because the records are usually secret, it’s difficult to compare D.C.’s system to the inner workings of other departments. For MPD, these hearings are trial-like, administrative proceedings in which officers, usually represented by their lawyer, plead their case to the panel.
At the end of the hearing, the panel decides whether to reject the appeal or issue its own judgment and disciplinary recommendations. A panel’s decision not to fire an officer leaves the police chief with few options. The chief can send the case back to another panel but cannot dole out any punishment more severe than what the panel recommends.
This appears to be somewhat atypical for many of the nation’s largest police departments. For example, in New York, the head of the department, by law, makes the final disciplinary determination and penalty finding, regardless of the outcome of a departmental hearing. The same is true in Houston, Dallas, Phoenix and other departments around the country.
Mike Gottert, who served as the director of MPD’s Disciplinary Review Division from 2016 to late 2019, said he and many within the department’s management were frustrated by how infrequently officers ended up being fired after a panel hearing. “Obviously, when we recommend people to be terminated, we think they should be terminated,” he said. “We’d go through this whole process, and the panel would say no for whatever reason.”
Gottert provided additional records from his tenure that show the Adverse Action Panels overturned nearly two-thirds of all terminations his department sought.
He said the panels are not always impartial. Not only was there a “fairly good chance” that the officer in question had worked with a panel member, he said, but panel members are influenced by their own particular views on what they believe is a fireable offense, regardless of what MPD’s handbook says.
The role of trial boards in preventing the department from terminating officers for misconduct after extensive internal investigations has largely gone unnoticed. The hearings are technically open to the public, but the department does not publicly release a schedule and can postpone or close hearings to the public without notice.
“It is hard to argue you have an effective accountability system when this number of officers remain on the force, even though the agency itself thinks they should not be police officers,” Christy Lopez, co-chair of D.C.’s Police Reform Commission, said when shown our findings.
Harold Martin, an attorney in the D.C. area who for years represented police officers in criminal cases, said the system may not be perfect, but it’s “a system everybody can live with.”
“The key device for rooting out real serious police misconduct is the criminal justice system, because that’s the quickest way somebody can be terminated – based on a criminal conviction. … Once you get beyond that, it’s more of a question of a system created by contract negotiation.”
Earlier this year, the Police Reform Commission recommended 90 reforms to increase police accountability. One of those recommendations was making the Adverse Action Panel’s hearings more accessible to the public.
“Everybody I’ve spoken to who’s gone to one has explained how difficult it actually is to attend: to know when they are, to find the literal room,” said Naïké Savain, a Police Reform Commission member and policy counsel at the advocacy group DC Justice Lab. “They can claim that these hearings are public. But they’re not – not really, not in practice.”
“They can claim that these hearings are public. But they’re not—not really, not in practice.”
NAÏKÉ SAVAIN, POLICE REFORM COMMISSION MEMBER
During a D.C. Council hearing on proposed police reform legislation in October, Contee, the police chief, told lawmakers that he has been frustrated by arbitration rules that have prevented him from firing officers. “Being forced to reinstate officers that MPD has already terminated is one of the worst tasks in my job,” he said.
But he also urged the council not to pass legislation that seeks to make police disciplinary records public and provide the city’s civilian oversight body, currently called the Office of Police Complaints, with unfettered access to police documents. Contee said the bill was unfair to officers and a violation of their privacy.
“How can we expect officers to respect constitutional rights if our city government disrespects theirs?” Contee asked. He also questioned expanding the power of the Office of Police Complaints – which, under the legislation, would need to include an ex-officio member of MPD, along with members who represent other groups particularly affected by policing in the District.
The legislation, Contee testified, “provides for no other qualifications for the board members – such as legal, labor or law enforcement experience or expertise, yet they are expected to review and advise on serious use of force, in-custody deaths, discipline and almost all police policy and training?” The D.C. Council has not voted on the legislation yet.
Ronald Faunteroy had asked to leave his shift four hours early to spend time with his family on that December night in 2015, according to Agent Charles Weeks’ internal report. At 11:51 p.m., he’d pulled out of the lower parking lot of the Second District headquarters. Three hours later, two surveillance cameras caught him driving in circles, five times, around a block known for being a hub of prostitution. Ten minutes after that, he backed into an alley and flashed his lights, according to the investigative report.
According to a description of the footage included in the internal affairs investigation, the video shows one of the sex workers approach Faunteroy’s car from the passenger side. The sex worker later told Weeks that she declined Faunteroy’s offer of $30 for oral sex because it wasn’t enough money. He drives off after less than a minute. But less than 10 minutes later, the surveillance video shows Faunteroy’s Nissan pull up on the sex worker, the report says.
She later told Weeks in an interview that Faunteroy was drunk and belligerent. He was slurring his words and accused her of stealing his phone.
That’s when Faunteroy pulled out his gun, she says. In the footage, Faunteroy is holding a dark object with his left hand.
“You can see my body, like, tensing up. … I’m yell – I’m like screaming at the top of my lungs right there,” she said while watching the surveillance footage with Weeks. She said she thought she was going to be shot.
Weeks tried to get an arrest warrant, but the U.S. attorney’s office – which prosecutes cases in D.C. – declined to prosecute the case. Weeks later recalled in his testimony during Faunteroy’s Adverse Action Panel that his exchange with an attorney at the office was “unprofessional.” He said the prosecutors kicked him out of the office after briefly viewing the footage and making a quick determination.
Now, it was time to interview Faunteroy. With a union representative alongside him, Faunteroy seemed nervous throughout the two-hour interview, according to a transcript of the interview included in the disciplinary files. He contradicted himself often and refused to answer even the most basic questions. He spoke at length about irrelevant details while claiming not to recall important moments of the night.
The pieces didn’t quite fit together for Weeks, and he said so, according to the transcript in the report. “We’re going around in circles,” he told Faunteroy. “I’m going to ask you straight up, what were you doing in that area?” He then went through everything he knew, laying out in detail Faunteroy’s whereabouts minute by minute.
Weeks then asked Faunteroy, for the final time, whether he pointed his weapon at the sex worker, and Faunteroy said yes. “You put the puzzle together,” he told Weeks in the interview.
Faunteroy was informed of the department’s decision to terminate him in April 2016. The next month, when the Adverse Action Panel convened, Faunteroy had rescinded his confession. Faunteroy’s new defense was simple: He got lost just before 3 a.m. in an area known for prostitution – a fact he testified that he did not know at the time. While trying to figure out where he was, a sex worker approached him. He later confronted her under the suspicion that she stole his phone and was armed, he told the panel. According to Faunteroy’s lawyers, there was not enough evidence to conclude he had either solicited prostitution or pointed his pistol at the sex worker. The only witnesses were the two sex workers, and neither were there to testify.
According to a description of the hearing, Contee – who at the time was a commander – had no questions for Faunteroy and instead used his time to comment about Faunteroy’s sense of direction. “It would be a sad day if we are not training our officers on how to get around from point A to point B,” he said.
He and the rest of the panel unanimously reduced Faunteroy’s termination to a 45-day suspension.
If you’re a big enough fan of crypto, you’ve probably heard the phrase “be your own bank” or the term “bankless” — the idea being that crypto can offer more control over your financial future than traditional finance. But how much of your financial life really can be accomplished via crypto?
The answer? A lot! As the cryptoeconomy has grown and evolved, a wide array of DeFi protocols, fintech firms, and crypto-first companies like Coinbase are forming a cryptocurrency infrastructure that can serve as an increasingly viable alternative to the traditional financial system. And with traditional banks offering near-zero interest rates, crypto offers a compelling alternative.
From crypto direct deposits and debit cards to decentralized saving/lending and cross-border payments, the cryptoeconomy is rapidly challenging many of the core ideas around what money is and how it can be put to work. Here are some of the ways you can get involved:
Direct deposit your paycheck
An increasing number of cryptocurrency and fintech companies — from Square to Paypal to Coinbase — are enabling the ability to direct deposit funds onto their platforms, making it easier to convert or directly receive traditional payments in crypto. Coinbase has begun rolling out the ability to receive direct deposits into your account — creating the possibility of more seamless crypto trades, spending via Coinbase Card(a Visa debit card tied to your account), earning crypto rewards, and more. You can choose to have your checks deposited in either crypto or US dollars — and can deposit as much or as little of your paycheck as you want. All for zero fees.
Some traditional banks are even beginning to integrate crypto directly into user accounts. In September 2021, with the help of Coinbase, Vast Bank became the “first federally chartered bank in the U.S. to offer the ability to buy, sell, and custody cryptocurrencies - directly from a checking account - all under one roof.”
The rise of crypto credit/debit cards
Once you have some crypto, you’ll probably find yourself asking the next question : how do you spend it?
Visa has made significant progress “connecting crypto and blockchain networks to its trusted, global payment network.” Visa currently has over 50 crypto wallet partners that can connect to over 70 million merchants worldwide. In the first half of 2021, Visa reported that it had processed over $1 billion worth of cryptocurrency payments.
Mastercard is also embracing crypto. In July 2021, Bloomberg reported that Mastercard is looking to make it easier for consumers to buy, spend, and hold cryptocurrencies. And merchants on its network will soon be able to accept crypto.
Coinbase customers can sign up for Coinbase Card — a debit card that allows Coinbase customers to seamlessly spend crypto held in their account at any merchant in Visa’s vast global network, while earning rewards for each purchase. Paired with Coinbase’s direct deposit feature, the Coinbase Card is a significant step toward a self-sustaining cryptoeconomy.
Staking
Many cryptocurrencies now use a “Proof of Stake” consensus mechanism — which is a way for their decentralized networks to ensure that all transactions are verified and secured without a bank or payment processor in the middle.
With certain cryptocurrencies, you can earn rewards for simply contributing to the security of the network — by “locking” some of your holdings into a staking pool for a certain timeframe. This is an excellent option if you were planning to hold onto the crypto for a longer period — instead of having it sit idle, you can put it to work for you.
Via the main Coinbase app or website, eligible users can stake Tezos, Cosmos, or ETH2 and earn as much as 5% APY (depending on the type of asset being staked) as of November 2021.
(Staking, whether through Coinbase or some other method, can come with risks including losing some or all of your staked funds — make sure to do your own research.)
Turn your dollars into stablecoins
One potential downside of staking rewards is that they’re paid in the native cryptocurrency, which can be volatile. But you can earn dollar-denominated rewards simply by buying and holding stablecoins like Dai and USD Coin (USDC).
Near-zero interest via traditional savings accounts mean that inflation drives down the value of your money over time. If you’re looking for higher yield — and are willing to accept the higher risks that come with new financial tech — DeFi protocols may offer a viable alternative.
DeFi protocols use smart contracts to enable transparent, peer-to-peer lending for potentially higher yields than traditional financial offerings. In this scenario you supply crypto assets into a liquidity pool, and earn yield from your crypto being borrowed by other users. As of September 2021, DeFi users could potentially earn yields up to 11% by lending stablecoins such as USDC on popular protocols like Aave and Compound. (You can also lend and borrow a wide range of cryptocurrencies including wrapped Bitcoin and ETH. DeFi is not without risk, so make sure to research any protocols you’re trusting with your crypto.)
In order to access DeFi apps, you will need a self-custody cryptocurrency wallet such as Coinbase Wallet or Metamask. These crypto wallets aren’t just places to hold assets. They also let you send and receive crypto — and, more importantly, they allow you to discover and interact with a huge array of crypto apps, from games to NFT markets to DeFi.
Borrow without a credit check
Looking for a line of credit that doesn’t require you to navigate DeFi apps? Residents of many U.S. states can also borrow up to $1 millionfrom Coinbase using your BTC as collateral — no credit check required.
Cross-border payments
One of the most innovative features of cryptocurrency is that it’s truly borderless. In September 2021, El Salvador made history by becoming the first country in the world to make Bitcoin legal tender, likely driven by a desire to reduce costly remittance payments — or payments sent home from family and friends living abroad. The nation’s official Bitcoin app Chivo had processed over $3 million worth of remittances on October 15th alone. For residents of developing economies – and their family and friends living abroad — the ability to send cross-border payments near-instantly and cheaply is transformative. Imagine if anyone with a smartphone could connect to a global monetary system and decentralized services for borrowing and lending?
In many developing countries, traditional remittance payment processors can be exorbitantly expensive, and cryptocurrency is an increasingly popular solution. As crypto research provider Chainalysis estimates, developing nations including Vietnam, India, and Pakistan are leading the world in crypto adoption.
In October, Facebook — now Meta — announced that it is partnering with Coinbase and Paxos for a new digital payments initiative called Novi. Novi’s initial pilot will enable users to transfer crypto between the U.S. and Guatemala instantly, securely, and with no fees.
What’s next for crypto and the financial system?
Two paths are emerging. Crypto will likely become increasingly integrated with traditional payment channels and banking infrastructure. And decentralized protocols will become more and more viable as alternatives.
