NYC cases show crooked cops' abuse of FBI database
NEW YORK (AP) — It's billed by the FBI as "the lifeline of law enforcement" — a federal database used to catch criminals, recover stolen property and even identify terrorism suspects.

But authorities say Edwin Vargas logged onto the restricted system and ran names for reasons that had nothing to do with his duties as a New York Police Department detective. Instead, he was accused in May of looking up personal information on two fellow officers without their knowledge.

The allegation against Vargas is one of a batch of corruption cases in recent years against NYPD officers accused of abusing the FBI-operated National Crime Information Center database to cyber snoop on co-workers, tip off drug dealers, stage robberies and — most notoriously — scheme to abduct and eat women.

The NCIC database serves 90,000 agencies and gets 9 million entries a day...

$20 million claim against DOC by man shot 16 times
Thirty-year-old Dustin Theoharis in Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, recovering from his twelfth surgery - this one to reconstruct his jaw. It’s unlikely he will ever fully recover from the barrage of bullets fired by police on Feb. 11, 2011. His attorney, Erik Heipt said that Theoharis suffered "a broken shoulder, 2 broken arms, broken legs, he had a compression fracture to his spine, damage to his liver and spleen.”

Theoharis wasn't the guy police were after. The King County Sheriff's deputy and Washington Department of Corrections officer who shot him were at the house to arrest a man who’d violated his parole. But in a search of the house after the shooting, they surprised Theoharis in the basement room he was renting.

Cole Harrison, who was at the house, described it this way: "They (the officers) rushed into that room like they were going to get somebody. I mean they rushed down there and then all of a sudden. Boom, boom, boom, boom.”

It’s estimated that the two officers fired more than 20 bullets; 16 hit Theoharis, who was lying in bed. The officers said they thought Theoharis was reaching for a gun. They later told investigators they weren’t sure how many bullets they fired....