Snouts in the Trough, Hooves in the Till: Why You Shouldn't Donate to a Police Charity

Tax-subsidized embezzlers: Mark and Sara Furniss

To understand why the public cannot confide in government-employed police to protect private property, it is useful to consider how frequently police steal from each other – and members of the public who ingenuously donate to police-operated charities. This isn’t because police officers are under-paid; it is because their occupation cultivates a sense of privilege and contempt for other people’s property. 

The median annual household income in Idaho is roughly $49,000. Mark Furniss, 46, was making almost $20,000 a year in excess of that figure when he resigned from his job as a Boise Police Officer on October 20, the same day that he and his wife Sara filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. At the time, Sara was employed as a “safe schools assistant” in the recently created West Ada School District. 

Together, Mark and Sara Furniss easily cleared $100,000 a year in salary and benefits, which is more than enough for their family of four to enjoy a very comfortable lifestyle in Boise. Yet Mark and Sara allegedly used their positions as president and office manager, respectively, with Treasure Valley Lodge #11 of the Fraternal Order of Police to embezzle $73,000 over a five-year period.   

The couple’s pilferage from the FOP’s accounts was noticed no later than February, which is when he was confronted by the organization’s president over his use of a union credit card to buy tickets to a Pittsburgh Pirates game and make more than $500 in personal purchases at a department store. A forensic audit was conducted, which quickly discovered that Mrs. Furniss had been systematically overpaying herself (she drew a salary from the FOP), misusing a lodge credit card, and had caused hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees. She later disclosed to investigators that she had set up an automatic withdrawal from an FOP account to pay the family’s cable television bill.

Detective Gary Marang of the Nampa Police Department, which has investigated the matter to avoid a conflict of interest, recalled in an affidavit that the couple also used FOP funds to make a $2,700 down payment on a travel trailer. They most likely intended to make use of that trailer to flee the jurisdiction: After filing for bankruptcy on October 20 (listing the FOP as among the “creditors” who would be stiffed by them), Mr. and Mrs. Furniss reportedly planned to head north to Alaska in search of a “fresh start.” 

Like countless others, the Mark and Sara rode the housing bubble and fell hard in 2008 when it burst. Their financial disclosure form lists a total of $572,992 in assets, including a Meridian home valued at $230,000. Their estimated liabilities are $384,095, which includes “more than a dozen credit cards and five charge accounts,” observes the Idaho Statesman. They had also purchased two expensive late-model SUVs. Despite the fact that they both drew very generous tax-subsidized salaries, they listed their monthly income at $869, with $5,742 in monthly expenses. Perhaps the most shocking line item in the form was the disclosure that the total value of the family’s checking accounts was $864. 

In the two weeks prior to the couple’s November 25 arrest, their FOP chapter had collected more than $73,000 through a GoFundMe account to raise money for three officers – two humans and a “K9 officer” – who were wounded in a shootout with a fugitive. It would have been useful for the public to know that the people in charge of the lodge’s finances had embezzled nearly an identical amount.

 

Nice tie, Mike.

Mark and Sara have two very young children, a fact that will be taken into account when they are given the customary Blue Privilege discount at sentencing time. Former Richfield, Ohio police officer Michael Simmons benefited from official leniency when his own longstanding embezzlement from the local FOP was discovered. 

Simmons has confessed to stealing more than $26,000 the FOP’s “Shop with a Cop” program, which is used to buy Christmas gifts for poor children. 

One might expect to see exemplary punishment imposed on someone who committed a Dickensian offense of that kind. One would be wrong to do so, when the offender is a member of the state’s enforcement caste. 

As was the case with Mark and Sara Furniss, Simmons squandered  money raised for charitable purposes on personal expenses and luxuries, including electronics, clothing, tools, and tickets to sporting events. Rather than being sent to prison for felony theft, the 42-year-old Simmons was given an 18-month suspended jail sentence, two years of probation, and 500 hours of community service. He will also be required to pay back only $15,000 of the money he stole, so full restitution – which is the only legitimate punishment for a crime against property – will not be required.

According to Richfield, Ohio Police Chief Keith Morgan, one reason Simmons won’t be required to pay back the full amount is because “the program’s lax bookkeeping made it difficult to pin down exactly how much was stolen and how much went to legitimate purchases,” reports the Akron Beacon Journal. 

Simmons’s attorney, Mark Guidetti, says that the judge’s very generous terms will allow Simmons to move on with his life and get another job. Now that he is tagged with a fourth-degree felony, it’s likely that he won’t find another gig involving a gun, badge, and qualified immunity. 

Embezzlement from FOP lodges is stunningly commonplace. One would expect that law enforcement officers, zealous for the honor of their coercive fraternity, would inflict exemplary punishment on those within their ranks who steal from their comrades in the brotherhood. As with so many other offenses, however, “professional courtesy” applies even to those who can’t keep their snouts out of the FOP’s trough. 

Former Hernando County, Florida Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Glatfelter was given five years’ probation after siphoning away $14,000 from the local FOP lodge – and more than $1,000 from a special fund established to benefit the family of a colleague who had died in an on-duty traffic accident. Struthers, Ohio Patrolman Thomas Granchie was allowed to resign without facing administrative charges after he admitted to stealing nearly $5,000 from his FOP lodge in 2007.  Judge William Kobelak spoke sympathetically of  Granchie as he sentenced the thirty-year veteran officer to 90 days house arrest for what should – and would – have been felony theft if committed by a Mundane.

“I want to look at him as a person with both good and bad things in his life;” Judge Kobelak said, apparently treating Granchie’s decades of service to the murderous abstraction called the “State” as extenuation for his self-serving felonious conduct. “This black cloud hanging over his head is always going to be there.”

Actually, that black cloud dissipated very rapidly. It was Granchie’s tax victim-provided police pension that proved to be permanent; this was made possible when the court dismissed the felony count and allowed the thief to plead guilty to a single charge of misdemeanor theft.

Such conduct is to be expected wherever large pools of money are entrusted to people who are clothed in “qualified immunity.”

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"Qualified Immunity": What Cops and Slave Overseers Have in Common

The late Kelly Thomas, following his fatal encounter with the slave overseers of the Fullerton PD.

Michael Slager, the former North Charleston, South Carolina police officer killed an unarmed man and then attempted to frame the victim, will not be convicted of murder. Nor is he likely to be convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

Slager’s jury deadlocked because a single member of the panel insisted that he could not “in good conscience” vote to convict Slager of criminal homicide. This is not because the facts of the case are in dispute. Slager was captured on video fatally shooting unarmed, 50-year-old Walter Scott in the back as he fled a traffic stop, and then placing a Taser next to his fatally traumatized body.

The critical issue for that juror, apparently, was whether Slager’s state of mind as he committed these acts transmuted them from criminal homicide and obstruction of justice into an exercise of state-conferred authority protected by “qualified immunity.” Specifically: Was the officer acting out of “total fear,” as he claimed, following what he said was a struggle in which Scott attempted to grab his Taser? Or was Slager acting out of “passion” – in this case, anger and outrage over Scott’s refusal to submit?

If Slager weren’t a member of the state’s punitive priesthood, these questions wouldn’t matter.  As a police officer, however, Slager enjoys precisely the same privileged status in the exercise of discretionary violence that was once afforded to slave owners and overseers in the antebellum South.

Under what we are required to pretend is the “law,” Slager – like any other police officer – is authorized to detain any citizen who provokes his suspicion, and to obtain that citizen’s submission using whatever increment of force he deems reasonable. From the point of such a seizure, the officer exercises a proprietary claim over the detainee until or unless he decides to release him – and any assertion of self-ownership on the part of the detainee can potentially be punished through summary execution.

In “The Constitution of Police Violence,” a soon-to-be published article for the UCLA Law Review, Dr. Alice Ristroph of the Seton Hall Law School describes case law regarding law enforcement encounters with citizens as “a blueprint for police violence. It invites officers to interrupt civilians, sometimes with minimal suspicion and sometimes with no suspicion at all. Once interrupted, the citizen must comply with the officer’s requests [which are more accurately described as `demands’] or risk expanding the officer’s authority. Actual or perceived non-compliance rapidly ratchets up the officer’s authorization to use force, and any non-compliance perceived to be dangerous empowers the officer to kill.” (Emphasis added.)

Every police agency in the country teaches its officers a “use of force continuum” that “sets the expectation of escalation,” continues Dr. Ristroph; “after the first resistance, force will escalate until the suspect is subdued or dead.” The resistance in question can be a purely verbal assertion of self-ownership – as in Eric Garner’s exasperated protest about the unwarranted harassment he had experienced, coupled with the declaration, “It stops today!”

As Ristroph observes, defiance of this variety constitutes “the uncodified but very real offense called `contempt of cop.’” A Mundane who refuses to acknowledge the proprietary claim made by the officer who detains him can expect summary punishment of the same kind once visited on slaves by their overseers, and for exactly the same reason. It was exceedingly uncommon for abusive slave “owners” or overseers to be punished. In similar fashion, only in exceptionally egregious cases will a police officer face prosecution for brutalizing a citizen.

One useful illustration of the scope of permissible police violence is seen in the fact that none of the eight Fullerton, California police officers who beat to death an unarmed, helpless, mentally ill man named Kelly Thomas five years ago was ever convicted of a criminal offense. That case also usefully underscores the fact that the slave overseer mindset of police is not a function of racial bias.

Only two of the assailants – Officers Manuel Ramos and Jay Cincinelli – were prosecuted, and they were acquitted. Dr. Steven Karch, an “expert witness” routinely deployed to defend criminal behavior by police, gave a credulous jury an excuse to pretend that the 160-pound Thomas somehow posed a threat to eight police officers, and that rather than being killed by the officers who beat, kicked, tasered, and suffocated him, Kelly just happened to die from the long-deferred consequences of methamphetamine use several years earlier.

As an overture to the beating, Officer Ramos theatrically snapped on latex gloves while taunting the victim: “See these fists? There’re getting ready to f*ck you up.” Cincinelli, who repeatedly clubbed the victim’s face with the butt of his Taser, later gloated that he had “just smashed his face to hell.”

Photographs taken of Kelly while he was in an irreversible coma attest to the thoroughness with which Cincinelli and his comrades carried out their mandate to obtain submission through criminal violence. I suspect that if photography had been available in 1839, similar pictures would exist of a slave woman named Mira who was beaten and scourged to death by a North Carolina resident named Hoover who presumed to claim her as his property.

So grotesque was the disfigurement of Mira’s mortal remains that Hoover was indicted for murder and then convicted of that offense by a jury culled from a population that was inured to the routine barbarism typical of chattel slavery.

In the ruling State v. John Mann ten years earlier, North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Thomas Ruffin wrote that “The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.”

A slave is “one doomed in his own person, and his posterity, to live without knowledge, and without the capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that another may reap the fruits,” Ruffin explained, and the slave would accept this only if the master exercised “uncontrolled authority over his body” – without that authority being subject to judicial review. In that 1829 case, a man who had leased a slave named Lydia had shot and wounded her when she tried to escape. The only salient issue for Ruffin was whether someone who had leased the labor of a human claimed as the property of another enjoyed the same legal immunities as the “owner” himself.

Ruffin dealt with similar questions a decade later in North Carolina v. Hoover. The appellant insisted that he had been required to exercise the “rights” explained by Ruffin’s earlier decision with great severity, because Mira “had attempted to burn his barn, and was disobedient and impudent to her mistress.” Hoover also claimed that Mira had attempted to poison his family. The “evidence” for those accusations was a confession extracted from the helpless woman through torture. At the time she was killed, Mira had just delivered a child and was too weak to work.

The trial judge had explained to the jury that they could acquit Hoover, or find him guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter, if they determined that the victim’s conduct provided “legal provocation” to the killer – which would have included disobeying “the orders of her master.” They could likewise find extenuation on Hoover’s behalf if the killing followed such a provocation so quickly that “his passion had not a reasonable time to cool and subside”; in those circumstances the offense would be manslaughter, rather than murder.

Slave “owners” and overseers, like contemporary cops, were expected to follow a “use of force continuum” in the exercise of power no human being can rightfully wield against another – and on those vanishingly rare occasions that resulted in prosecution, the courts were expected to prioritize leniency.

Ruffin’s ruling in North Carolina v Hoover was unalloyed barbarism lacquered with genteel language. He offered an extravagant apology to the killer as he explained that he could not find sufficient grounds for overturning the conviction – and not for want of effort.

“A master may lawfully punish his slave,” Ruffin declared, “and the degree must, in general, be left to his own judgment and humanity, and cannot be judicially questioned. But the master’s authority is not altogether unlimited. He must not kill. There is, at the least, this restriction upon his power; he must stop short of taking a life.”

The slave’s is a lesser life than that of the person claiming to own him, to be sure, and wherever possible, means will be found to justify the lethal exercise of a slave master’s discretion: “If death unhappily ensue from the master’s chastisement of the slave, inflicted apparently with a good intent, for reformation or example, and with no purpose to take a life, or to put in in jeopardy, the law would doubtless tenderly regard every circumstances, which, judging from the conduct generally of masters toward slaves, might reasonably be supposed to have hurried the party into excess.”

Buried beneath that avalanche of adverbs is a principle now known as “qualified immunity,” which is now invoked to justify the criminal violence of police officers like Michael Slager.

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"Justice Has No Expiration Date": The Continued Wrongful Imprisonment of Chris Tapp

Scenes from the Tapp hearing: Bonneville County DA Clark (left), ADA Dewey, Public Defender Thomas.

There were about twenty people gathered in an Idaho Falls courtroom on November 22 for a hearing about Christopher Tapp’s appeal for post-conviction relief. That Tapp is serving a life sentence for a murder he didn’t commit was known by everyone in that room. Two of them, Bonneville County Prosecuting Attorney Daniel Clark and deputy Prosecutor John Dewey, were there in an attempt to convince Judge Alan Stephens that the truth didn’t matter, and that justice must be subordinated to “process.”

Judge Stephens’s proper role, Dewey argued, was to act as a “gatekeeper,” rather than to permit a critical examination of a conviction that an official report commissioned by the prosecutor’s office has now acknowledged is entirely the product of a spurious confession. Nationally accredited experts on police interrogation have likewise concluded that Tapp’s confession was achieved through tactics that were tantamount to psychological torture.

 

A few weeks ago, Judge Stephens ruled that Tapp’s appeal could proceed because of evidence that the prosecution had withheld videotaped polygraph examinations in which IFPD Detective Stephen Finn manipulated Tapp into a false confession. Finn had convinced Tapp that the polygraph machine was something akin to a comprehensive archive of objective facts about the July 1996 murder of 18-year-old Angie Dodge. Those “facts” comported with whatever theory of the case was in favor with the IFPD at any given time. 

The initial theory was that a friend of Tapp’s, a young man named Ben Hobbs who had been arrested in Ely, Nevada for rape, was the murderer. Tapp and another friend named Jeremy Sargis were identified as potential witnesses. Along with Hobbs, each of them gave DNA samples to the police. Sargis was the son of a wealthy and influential family who could afford competent legal representation – which is why he resolutely refused to speak with the police after his DNA sample cleared him as a suspect.

 

Chris and Verna Tapp.

Tapp, a high school dropout, was more pliant. He was interrogated by former IFPD Sergeant Jared Fuhriman, who had become acquainted with Tapp while serving as a school resource officer and DARE instructor. With the calculated, sociopathic opportunism of a child molester, Fuhriman groomed Tapp and relentlessly exploited him, playing on the 20-year-old’s ingenuous trust and assuring him that all the police really wanted was his cooperation in identifying the man who had killed one of his friends. 

The original IFPD plan was to set the three friends off against each other. That scheme collapsed after Sargis and Hobbs were both ruled out as suspects by the genetic evidence. Tapp was also cleared. However, because he was willing to talk to the police – a mistake nobody should ever make – he was the one left without a chair when the music stopped. 

Because he had regurgitated lies told to him by his police captors, Tapp lost his immunity agreement. His mother, Verna, became alarmed over what was happening and told Chris that he was not to submit to any further interrogation without an attorney being present. When it became known to Fuhriman that the victim of his mental molestation was seeking help from a trusted adult, he arrested Chris on a contrived charge of “harboring a fugitive” – a charge that presumes the existence of a murderer other than Chris. 

Tapp was not the suspect that Angie Dodge or her traumatized family deserved, but he was the one the IFPD and the Bonneville Prosecutor’s Office needed. Rather than trying to solve the case by finding the murderer, the police and then-County Attorney Kip Manwaring decided to clear the case with the suspect that they had in custody. Fuhriman and his comrades fed Tapp critical details about the crime, at one point taking him to the crime scene in a visit that was not recorded or memorialized in any way. Then they used the details they had fed to their victim to incriminate him in a crime of which he had no independent knowledge. 

The role played by polygraph specialist Finn was critical. Tapp was told that his denials registered deception – which was a lie – and that his self-incriminating statements were truthful – another deliberate lie. Over the course of several coercive polygraph “examinations,” Finn told Tapp that even if he had participated in the assault on Dodge, he could avoid the death penalty if he made a confession. Acting purely out of fear for his life, Tapp provided the IFPD with that confession. In doing so he presented a story that still didn’t comport with the evidence: He didn’t accurately describe the clothing worn by the victim, or the nature of her wounds. 

“The appellate public defender had the files of Tapp’s trial attorney, Robert Booker,” Tapp’s current attorney John Thomas recalls in a motion presented on November 22.  “In those files were found two video cassette boxes that contained four (4) Tapp polygraph videos. These four polygraph videos had not been previously identified as being produced.”

Three of the videos documented sessions that were clearly “coercive” in nature. One of them, according to Finn’s sworn testimony, did not exist. 

While the videotapes were in the trial attorney’s files, “they had not been `disclosed’” by the prosecution, Thomas contends. “In effect, they were hidden. By negligence or design, their existence was kept secret from the defense.” One of the most damaging of the coercive interrogations, as Thomas demonstrated to me from records he shared during a brief interview in his office, had been artfully mislabeled in order to minimize its importance. 

It was after Judge Stephens’s recent ruling in September that Tapp’s appellate attorney, John Thomas, found that videotape in the discovery file. He immediately alerted deputy prosecutor John Dewey regarding what he had found, and cleared time in his schedule so that the two of them could watch it together. 

If Thomas had acted with the same ethical indifference that has been displayed by the Bonneville Prosecutor’s Office, he would have concealed his discovery from the prosecution, rather than making a full disclosure of what he had found. In keeping with the abysmal standards of the office that employs him, Dewey capitalized on Thomas’s good faith by accusing him, during the November 22 hearing, of seeking to perpetrate a “fraud on the court” and demanding that Tapp’s appeal be dismissed.

Thomas allowed carefully modulated yet well-earned outrage to color his presentation to Judge Stephens. Addressing the prosecution’s claim that Tapp’s appeal was barred by time limitations, Thomas declared that “Justice does not have an expiration date.”

“An innocent man is sitting in prison,” while the prosecution continues its relentless obstructionism. If the Bonneville County justice system – such as it is – forecloses the possibility that Tapp will receive long-deferred due process, “That will be the day I turn my bar card in, because this court would not deserve my representation,” Thomas defiantly declared. 

Sitting next to me during Thomas’s argument was Carol Dodge, the victim’s mother, who has spent the last twenty years diligently investigating that crime. She has become Christopher Tapp’s most effective and impassioned advocate, and a close friend of his long-suffering mother, Verna. In the hallway outside the courtroom prior to the November 22 hearing, Carol and Verna embraced each other as if they were sisters, which, in a sense, they have become: They belong to sorority of mothers whose children have been taken from them through criminal violence – Angie through murder, Christopher through state-licensed kidnapping. 

“The prosecution has all the advantages,” Carol whispered to me during Thomas’s presentation, her voice heavy with bitter frustration. “If they have the power to hold an innocent man in prison, do they have the power to breathe life back into my daughter?” she continued, sobbing the final syllables of that anguished inquiry. 

Judge Stephens announced that he would be submitting a written ruling at some unspecified time in the future. Meanwhile, Tapp remains a prisoner of the Bonneville County Prosecutor’s arrogant intransigence.

As County Prosecutor Clark departed the courtroom, I noticed that his right arm was in a sling. Gesturing to his injured appendage, I asked Clark if “this happened while you were wrestling with your conscience – and winning.” 

Clark’s shoulders slumped, and after an awkward moment he replied that he had hurt himself in a dirt bike accident. That explanation struck me as plausible: I had foolishly assumed that Clark’s conscience would be strong enough to put up much of a fight.


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The privileges enjoyed by a police officer in a confrontation with a citizen are exactly the same as those afforded to slave owners in the antebellum South:



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