Anonymous Releases Personal Police Data in Response to Cincinnatti Police Shooting

[David Guyatt]

'Anonymous' releases personal data on Cincinnati police officers including chief

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February 22, 2016 4:05 PM MST

Greetings world, we are Anonymous Anon Verdict. The following clip you are about to see are three separate cell phone clips of Cincinnati Police Department murdering a black man named Paul Gaston while he held his hands up on February 17th.

Anon Verdict/YouTube

The hacktivist group Anonymous Anon Verdict posted a video to their YouTube channel on February 21 taking the police in Cincinnati to task and releasing personal information on 52 employees with the Cincinnati Police Department including rank-and-file officers all the way up to Police Chief Eliot Isaac, according to a report from WLWT in Cincinnati. The reason for the Anonymous video is the group's displeasure over how the Cincinnati police handled a fatal officer-involved shooting in the city's Westwood neighborhood.



Anon Verdict/YouTube screenshot
That officer-involved shooting took place last week after police shot a man, Paul Gaston, who crashed his car into a pole. When police approached the man following the crash, "investigators said Gaston initially complied with officer's orders but then failed to comply with officer's commands and reached to his belt to grab a gun," according to WLWT.
When Gaston made the move for his belt, police on the scene shot him. Gaston's gun turned out to be a pellet gun.
Anonymous is angry over the fatal shooting arguing that Gaston did comply with the officers' commands and went on to cite another incident one day earlier in the Mount Healthy neighborhood "where a man pointed a gun at officers but was taken into custody," according to WLWT.
Fox News shared portions of the Anonymous' video transcript: "Thin Blue Line, your game is over. You lost. While we release your officers' information, we will hold no responsibility of the actions of those that see the information." The information released via that YouTube video "included names, ages, street addresses, email addresses and social media accounts, as well as the names and addresses of officers' family members," according to Fox.
Fraternal Order of Police president Sgt. Dan Hils said that officials are concerned about all that personal data going public. Lt. Steve Saunders of the Cincinnati Police Department said that officials are investigating the data breach to try and ascertain the depth of risk to officers and their families, according to Cincinnati.com which quoted Hils as saying "For myself, personally, I'm not going to let myself lose any sleep over this fringe group.

The above report is from The Examiner

[Michael Barwell]

Anonymous is amorphous, of course, but at it's heart, there's a direct '69' with the police/surveillance state. Some of them'll be the same people. This is just so much PRbollocks.