State trooper Lisa Steed is the first woman to be selected as Trooper of the Year in Utah for her record of hundreds of DUI arrests. She was celebrated as having a type of sixth sense for drunk drivers that allowed her to rake up an unprecedented number of hundreds of such arrests in a year. She is now a former trooper after her arrests were found to be invalid. What is striking is how prosecutors long suspected that Steed was unreliable as a witness but she was allowed to continue to abuse citizens. Ironically, in an interview during her illustrious career, Steed referred to her work as a “numbers game,” where she assumed that one in every 10 drivers stopped for a violation is driving impaired.
Steed is trying to get her job back as various drivers are suing the state for her false arrests. One lawsuit recounts how drivers faced employment and financial ruin over their false arrests while Steed was being celebrated as a supercop. The lawsuit notes that Steed was off the charts in her raw number of arrests but the Utah Highway Patrol made no inquiry as she set a state record of 400 arrests. She made some of these arrests after drivers passed sobriety field tests.
Lt. Steve Winward simply told the press at the time that “with her training and experience, it’s second nature for her to find these people who are driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.” It now appears that the “second nature” was to simply arrest everyone to the applause of people like Winward.
In May 2010, a memo written by Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Rob Nixon raised Steed’s “pattern” of questionable DUI arrests. The memo noted that she relied on impressions that were unreliable and found flawed. Yet, the UHP allowed her to continue to abuse citizens. In April 2012, prosecutors admitted that they would not rely on Sneed due to her dubious arrests that often were thrown out in court. Yet, she was allowed to continue to abuse citizens.
It was not until April 2012 that Sneed was finally taken off patrol and then fired in November 2012.
The scandal shows how much of our enforcement efforts are driven by pressure to “get the numbers up” on arrests. The UHP was obviously not particularly concerned about the abuse of citizens as it was rewarding officers for maximizing arrests. Sneed is not the only officer who should be fired given this record.
Source: Fox
Tea party? I’m a registered democrat, I just live on THIS planet. I won’t take the time to rebut your conspiracies that are proven facts. Doesn’t mean that I can’t or that I accept government actions and explanations without scrutinizing them, but by your standards I’d then be bound by proving things like that the ocean is wet and helium is lighter than air. To rebut your wild and outrageous accusations would only harm my credibility. I do however appreciate your daily comic relief. Moon landing happened in a movie studio…. CLASSIC…
Alfonse Koonce and osprich — if you two clowns could rebut anything i’ve
posted, I think you would have done so, but since you can’t, you put on a demonstration of ignorant cowardice that no doubt embarrasses all but your
most favorite fellow Tea Partiers. Pathetic.phonies.
Ignorant*
Otteray and Darren, pure genious : ) Doesn’t hurt that I saw that post while watching The Walking Dead. He’s ignornt for a human, but quite eloquent to be undead.
Darren,
Do you think we should send flowers or is it too late? I mean, Bill has been dead now for seven months, rest his soul. He must be posting as a zombie. I even found a picture he could use as his avatar.
This must be a great likeness, don’t you think?
http://i617.photobucket.com/albums/tt256/otteraylens/061aa879.jpg
“Newtown Seeks To Deny Newspapers Access To Sandy Hook Victims Death Certificates”
http://letsrollforums.com/newtown-seeks-deny-newspapers-t29130.html?t=29130
The Newtown, Connecticut Town Clerk is seeking to deny newspapers from viewing public record death certificates of Sandy Hook victims, according to the Newtown Bee.
Goback to sleep, Murryca.
Hey look, there’s that “training and experience” thingy again…
“Lt. Steve Winward simply told the press at the time that “with her training and experience, it’s second nature for her to find these people who are driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.” It now appears that the “second nature” was to simply arrest everyone to the applause of people like Winward.”
bill here is a lesson for all in understanding your version of logic.
Bill McWilliams 84 of Trenton passed away Saturday August 4, 2012 at his home in Trenton.
It would seem according to this death notification that bill mcwilliams died in 2012, how could he possibly be the person who posts these rantings on jonathanturley.org? Everyone knows that bill died and in his place men in black are using this dopplegänger of bill to refute all the truths in the world
It is just another one of those gov’t lies that you keep eating up so that you will never question anything.
bill
Have you ever considered with regard to the SSDI listing of lanza that it might have been a typographical error? Waht is more likely: Someone doing data entry hits a [3] instead of a [4] when the keys are right next to each other and that is a frequent mistake, or that everything else in the school shooting is a fabrication despite all the video / dead kids / dead shooter / witness accounts?
Plus, IF the gov’t wanted to shootup an elementary school in an American city, what possible reason would there be to forge his death certificate’s dates? There is no advantage in doing this no matter how nefarious the gov’t goals might be. And that is assuming the most looney toon gov’t wants to kill school children point of view. (which is yours I suspect)
As Otteray commented previously about Tail Numbers on aircraft. He is correct in that. As far as my experience has been I had to deal with people’s driver licenses and ID documents many times every day. A few times a year I would encounter someone who had official ID that had an incorrect date of birth on it. Usually this was a 16 year old who just got their driver license or a recent immigrant. In fact, my best friend had this happen to him when he got his learner’s permit. The same electronic device (keyboard) coupled with human error led to ths mistake. That said, it did not mean that because the driver license read their DOB was a day earlier it did not change the fact that they were retroactively born the day before.
And yes, it does take quite some time to correct errors on gov’t documents. My dad’s birth certificate spelled his name incorrectly. The third letter of his middle name was mistakenly not capitalized. Over time he just abandoned capitalizing it to make it consistent. It does not mean that my dad’s birth was fraudulent or did not occur.
Tea Party? Right winger?
Have you ever actually read this blog, bill?
That was what is known as a rhetorical question.
You really are a piece of work. Here I compliment your(arguably) low-brow
taste and your response came straight from the Tea Party book on what to say when you have nothing to say that’s worth saying.
You people really are all alike. Right-wingers everywhere, UNITE!
Oh no. Thank you, bill. Your blather makes me hear it all the time. I’m just spreading the joy.
Anyone that appreciates Benny Hill can’t be all bad. Thanks for sharing your cultural tastes in comedy and music. Like Benny, you’re a real hoot!
Apollo Astronot is certain in his belief that aliens have visited Earth, and he also claims to have seen a UFO while on his way to the Moon…and never mind that none of the Apollo missions ever left low Earth orbit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhNdxdveK7c
Oh, and Mr./Ms. Scribe, any lawyer can tell you that conspiracies are extremely common, and YOU too are a conspiracy theorist. You just happen to believe in the bush 9/11 conspiracy – which requires a belief in miracles in order to be true.
As for the anecdote you mention, it has nothing to do with the fact that the planes of 9/11 didn’t crash – and evidence of that is the fact they weren’t even deregistered until 2005. Crashed airliners can’t continue to be operated as though they hadn’t crashed.
That’s a novel excuse you gave. Usually, people like you try to explain away things like this by saying things like: gov’t incompetence , negligence ,coincidence etc.
is it your opinion that SSDI mistakes happen fairly often, and it’s just a coincidence that it happened in the case of Adam Lanza?
You don’t seem to know or care that the gov’t lies all the time, and they count on people like you eating it up and never questioning anything.
A book or two on logic and critical thinking might help you.
As for deregistering airplanes; the idiot to whom I sold my plane flew it into a grove of pine trees a couple of months later. The final accident report was not published for well over a year, and that was just a private plane crash with no fatalities. I could still find the registration number on line for several years thereafter. I know because I looked it up several times out of nostalgia. Just because a plane is destroyed, they do not rush around to deregister the N-number. It simply no longer matters whether it is registered or not if it is destroyed. Bureaucrats get around to the paperwork in due time. With the big budget cuts, everything takes longer.
You really ought to get out more. Reading conspiracy theory blogs will not make you smarter, and you will be less prone to embarrassing yourself.
bill:
“Evidence?” That word does not mean what you think it means
Ornery,
You could be forgiven for thinking that if the SSDI date was wrong, it woul have been corrected by now.
I realize that you as well informed on the facts as you’d like people to think, so let me give you an example of how the Gov’t operates whenever they accidentally let the cat out of the bag.
After 9/11, it was noted that the Dept. of Transportation’s records showed
that AA FL 77 was not scheduled for 9/11. Later, the records were changed to read that the flight was “canceled”. BTW, none of the planes that allegedly crashed were even deregistered until 2005.
Stuff happens, but you wouldn’t know it if you don’t study the evidence.
Bill McW
Since I have not even seen the documents to which you refer, I have no idea what you are talking about. Furthermore, documents sometimes get the wrong date written in. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have done that in the past forty years. I could buy a new car with the money.
My most memorable case was when the attorney doing the cross examination asked me to identify the defendant. I pointed him out. Attorney wanted to know if I was absolutely sure. I was sure. With a huge theatrical dramatic flourish, he pulled out a copy of my records, waving them around in front of the jury, where he gleefully pointed out the box for “race” was checked, “Black or Negro.” The defendant was a very white Caucasian. Stuff happens. He was convicted anyway.
bill, you remind me very much of that attorney.