Mumia Abu-Jamal is an American political activist and journalist who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1982 for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. While on death row, he has written and commented on the criminal justice system in the United States. After numerous appeals, his death penalty sentence was overturned by a federal court. In 2011, the prosecution agreed to a sentence of life imprisonment without parole. He entered the general prison population early the following year.
Police perjury is the act of a police officer knowingly giving false testimony. It is typically used in a criminal trial to "make the case" against defendants believed by the police to be guilty when irregularities during the suspects' arrest or search threaten to result in their acquittal. It also can be extended to encompass substantive misstatements of fact to convict those whom the police believe to be guilty, procedural misstatements to "justify" a search and seizure, or even the inclusion of statements to frame an innocent citizen. More generically, it has been said to be "[l]ying under oath, especially by a police officer, to help get a conviction."
MOVE, originally the Christian Movement for Life, is a communal organization that advocates for nature laws and natural living, founded in 1972 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, by John Africa. The name, styled in all capital letters, is not an acronym. MOVE lived in a communal setting in West Philadelphia, abiding by philosophies of anarcho-primitivism. The group combined revolutionary ideology, similar to that of the Black Panthers, with work for animal rights.
Abscam, sometimes written ABSCAM, was an FBI sting operation in the late 1970s and early 1980s that led to the convictions of seven members of the United States Congress and others for bribery and corruption. The two-year investigation initially targeted trafficking in stolen property and corruption of prominent business people, but later evolved into a public corruption investigation. The FBI was aided by the Justice Department and convicted con-man Mel Weinberg in videotaping politicians accepting bribes from a fictitious Arabian company in return for various political favors.
Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, also known as Geronimo Ji-Jaga and Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, was a decorated military veteran and a high-ranking member of the Black Panther Party in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Born in Louisiana, he served two tours in Vietnam, receiving several decorations. He moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at UCLA under the GI Bill and joined the Black Panther Party.
William John Burns was an American private investigator and law enforcement official. He was known as "America's Sherlock Holmes" and earned fame for having conducted private investigations into a number of notable incidents, such as clearing Leo Frank of the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan, and for investigating the deadly 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing conducted by members of the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers. From August 22, 1921, to May 10, 1924, Burns served as the director of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), predecessor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The Philadelphia Police Department is the police agency responsible for law enforcement and investigations within the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The PPD is one of the oldest municipal police agencies, fourth largest police force and sixth largest non-federal law enforcement agency in the United States. Since records were first kept in 1828, at least 289 PPD officers have died in the line of duty.
The Rampart scandal was a police corruption scandal which unfolded in Los Angeles, California, United States, during the late 1990s and early 2000s. The scandal concerned widespread criminal activity within the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) anti-gang unit of the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division. More than 70 police officers were initially implicated in various forms of misconduct, including unprovoked shootings and beatings, planting of false evidence, stealing and dealing narcotics, bank robbery, perjury, and cover-ups thereof.
The blue wall of silence, also blue code and blue shield, are terms used to denote the informal code of silence among police officers in the United States not to report on a colleague's errors, misconducts, or crimes, especially as related to police brutality in the United States. If questioned about an incident of alleged misconduct involving another officer, while following the code, the officer being questioned would perjure themselves by feigning ignorance of another officer's wrongdoing.
The Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption was a five-member panel initially formed in April 1970 by Mayor John V. Lindsay to investigate corruption within the New York City Police Department. The creation of the commission was largely a result of the publicity generated by the public revelations of police corruption made by Patrolman Frank Serpico and Sergeant David Durk. The commission concluded that the NYPD had systematic corruption problems, and made a number of recommendations.
Blue Murder is a two-part Australian television crime drama miniseries produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1995, and is based on true events.
Arnold Beverly is a Philadelphia man who rose to prominence during the legal appeals following the 1982 trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal. In 1999, Beverly signed an affidavit confessing to the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner. Beverly swore that while acting as a hitman for the mob hired by corrupt Philadelphia police officers, he, not Abu-Jamal, killed officer Faulkner.
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Mumia Abu-Jamal was a 1982 murder trial in which Mumia Abu-Jamal was tried for the first-degree murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner. A jury convicted Abu-Jamal on all counts and sentenced him to death.
Philadelphia consistently ranks above the national average in terms of crime, especially violent offenses. It has the highest violent crime rate of the Top 10 American cities with a population greater than 1 million residents as well as the highest poverty rate among these cities. It has been included in real estate analytics company NeighborhoodScout's "Top 100 Most Dangerous Cities in America" list every year since it has been compiled. Much of the crime is concentrated in the North, West, and Southwest sections of the city. The deadliest year in Philadelphia was 2021 with 562 murders.
Thomas J. Spota III is a former American attorney and politician, who served as the District Attorney of Suffolk County, New York, serving from 2002 to late 2017, but was disbarred on June 10, 2020. Spota resigned November 10, 2017, after he was indicted on federal charges of obstruction of justice in the investigation of Suffolk County Police Chief James Burke. Spota was subsequently found guilty and sentenced to five years in federal prison and fined $100,000.
Captain Richard Barry Costello was an American police officer in Philadelphia who was President of the Philadelphia Lodge of the FOP. In 2008, he unsuccessfully challenged incumbent John Perzel in Pennsylvania's 172nd Legislative District in Northeast Philadelphia.
Throughout the history of the New York City Police Department, numerous instances of corruption, misconduct, and other allegations of such, have occurred. Over 12,000 cases have resulted in lawsuit settlements totaling over $400 million during a five-year period ending in 2014. In 2019, taxpayers funded $68,688,423 as the cost of misconduct lawsuits, a 76 percent increase over the previous year, including about $10 million paid out to two exonerated individuals who had been falsely convicted and imprisoned.
We Own This City is an American crime drama miniseries based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton. The miniseries was developed by George Pelecanos and David Simon and directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green. The six-episode series premiered on HBO on April 25, 2022.
Colcor, short for Columbus County Corruption, was an undercover criminal investigation conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into corrupt activities involving government officials in Columbus County, North Carolina. While the FBI had for several years received complaints about alleged protection rackets and election fraud, they did not begin an investigation until 1980, when one of their former informants moved to the county and reported that he was being told to pay bribes to ensure the smooth operation of his business. Their investigation centered on the activities of undercover agents posing as corrupt businessmen with connections to the Detroit Mafia.
