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Off Duty Cops Protect Wilson; Man's Encounter with Cop Goes Viral; Lawsuit: Apple Illegally Blocked Competition
Aired December 03, 2014 - 10:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
RON HOSKO, LAW ENFORCEMNT LEGAL DEFENSE FUND: Not a marquee in front of the house that draws as much attention as it may divert. Maybe one person, maybe two people so that Officer Wilson, former Officer Wilson, can sleep at night.
BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wilson's lawyers say it's not just Darren Wilson these officers are protecting.
GREG KLOEPPEL, ATTORNEY FOR DARREN WILSON: There are threats out there not only against himself but his family as well.
TODD: Including Wilson's new wife who is pregnant and on leave from the Ferguson police. One concern the attorneys and law enforcement experts have -- efforts by hackers and others to track Darren Wilson down.
HOSKO: There are cyber activists in our world who are going to be actively trying to find out where is Darren Wilson. They're going to be trying to find out where did Darren Wilson spend his last dollar so that they can track and put out in public where he is and really create an enhanced threat to him.
TODD: St. Louis county community activist John Gaskin doesn't begrudge Wilson the protection but he says others in the Ferguson area will be upset by it and the people protecting Wilson should ask themselves some tough questions.
JOHN GASKIN, ST. LOUIS COUNTY COMMUNITY ACTIVITY: The question that you would that would come to mind for me is do they feel as though Darren Wilson was doing his job and the question even becomes would they have done it.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
TODD: (inaudible) order of police director Jim Pasco is critical of the Ferguson police department in the situation saying that department was quote, "unwilling or unable" to protect Darren Wilson while he was still formally part of their force after the Michael Brown shooting. Pasco says the Ferguson police never protected Wilson and said quote, "that's what the police department is supposed to do." We tried several times to get response from the Ferguson police to that comment. We've not heard back -- Carol?
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: It seems to take a lot of -- I don't know. I mean I think Officer Darren Wilson should have been protected but it would be costly, wouldn't it?
TODD: It really would. Now, the law enforcement expert we spoke to in our piece, Ron Hosko, said if you're paying a police officer a standard rate they would get maybe $30 an hour minimum. Now in this case you're also talking about multiple officers over the course of a day or a week working in shifts to protect him. Then you've got the cost of food, of rental properties where you might have to move him.
This is an expensive detail. We know the officers are doing this on a voluntary basis, not being paid but there are other very serious expenses involved here.
COSTELLO: All right. Brian Todd reporting live from Washington this morning, thank you.
In Michigan, a tense exchange between a cop and a 25-year-old African- American man has gone viral after that man was stopped for walking around with his hands in his pockets. That exchange prompted by this 911 call from a very nervous store owner.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's a light skinned guy that passes by five, six times back and forth back and forth looking at us, looking inside. He looks suspicious.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you or anyone else in immediate danger?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No. I mean I'm assuming yes because he keeps looking back and forth looking at us.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
COSTELLO: So that caller went on to say that the suspicious man had his hands in his pockets. A description that led cops to Brandon McKeon. Here's what happened next.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right, doing what?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You were walking by.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ok.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm going to pull out my cell phone.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Walking by and doing what?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You were making people nervous.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: By walking by?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, they said you had your hands in your pockets.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Wow, walking by having your hands in your pockets makes people nervous to call police when it's snowing outside.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They did.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ok.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you ok?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm fine, how about you?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm good.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What are you up to today?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Walking with my hands in my pockets, walking.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is it an inconvenience to talk to me right now?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hell yes just because of the whole police situation going across the country. this is outrageous. That you would let somebody tell you there's somebody walking down the street with their hands in their pockets. There's 10,000 people in Pontiac right now with their hands in their pockets. So how many --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're right. But we do have a lot of robberies so I'm just checking on you.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COSTELLO: And it all ended peacefully. Joining me now to talk about this is that officer's boss, Sheriff Michael Bouchard of Oakland County, Michigan. Welcome, sir, I'm glad you're here.
SHERIFF MICHAEL BOUCHARD, OAKLAND COUNTY, MICHIGAN: Good morning, thank you.
COSTELLO: Thanks for being here. You say the video was posted with an agenda. What do you mean?
BOUCHARD: Well, you know, it was posted under the header "Stopped because you had your hands in your pocket" and really that doesn't give the totality of circumstances. And that may not have been this individual's intent but that's what some of the so-called Internet journalists began to share and that's how it began to get echoed and ultimately went viral.
He wasn't stopped simply because he was walking on the sidewalk and had his hands in his pocket. He was stopped because there was a 911 call from a business that described him walking past their window five to six times and this business or their employees had been held up seven times.
They were afraid there was an imminent armed robbery. So obviously they called 911 and it's our job to respond to 911. So in the totality of circumstances, I think most people say, yes, the police have a duty to respond to 911 and, quite frankly, I think everybody did their job here.
The public we always ask if you see something that makes you afraid or suspicious -- call us. We'd rather check out a hundred things and find that it's false than miss one real.
COSTELLO: But you're right, sir -- you're right, sir, about the narrative because it's gone viral and the reason it's gone viral is because police questioned a man because he was walking back and forth in front of a store with his hands in his pocket. This is how Stephen Colbert portrayed it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHEN COLBERT, TALK SHOW HOST: Things would be a lot calmer if black people just agreed never to put their hands up. Or in their pockets as seen in this encounter with a police officer being filmed by a black man who asked why he was being stopped.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're making people nervous.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: By walking by?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, they said you had your hands in your pockets.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Wow, walking by having your hands in your pockets makes people nervous to call police when it's snowing outside?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What are you up to today?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Walking with my hands in my pockets.
COLBERT: You can't trust someone with their hands in their pockets? Pockets are the holster of the fist.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COSTELLO: So when you see that, what goes through your mind?
BOUCHARD: Well, I think unfortunately a lot of people make their living fanning really what are serious discussions and serious problems in America. But that's not what happened here. In this situation, the officer was very respectful. The individual that was contacted on the street was respectful. The rest of the video from the officer shows that the man actually agrees that if he called 911 on someone he thought was suspicious he would expect police to respond and talk to that person.
There's really a simple question. Do you want police to respond to 911 or not? Because that's what we did.
COSTELLO: But, sheriff, do you understand it from the African- American man's point of view? Here you are, it's cold outside, you're walking around with your hands in your pocket, you're not doing anything wrong yet you're accosted by this police officer and you're suspected of being a criminal. BOUCHARD: Well, he's not accosted. He's contacted and talked to.
But let me take it into a different context. When I was a young officer I responded to a burglary in progress alarm at a home. When I pull up in the driveway, alone, I saw a young teenager running out of the backyard towards the other house. I yelled to stop, they kept running, I chased that person down, handcuffed him around the tree until I could ascertain if I was alone with other suspects or what had happened. Turned out it was a false alarm. So I went back, uncuffed the young man who was white and apologized profusely.
But in the totality of circumstances, with an alarm burglary in progress call at that home and he flees from it, he was stopped and briefly detained. That's what our job is, is to follow up on information at hand. If it's not what it looks like to that store owner or anyone else then we change the process, we apologize and move on. That's what happened here. Everybody did their job.
COSTELLO: So it was really the store owner who might have been racially profiling this man.
BOUCHARD: Who was profiling? I'm sorry.
COSTELLO: The store owner who called 911.
BOUCHARD: Well, the store owner, if you look at his business it's about 90 percent African-American, his employees are about 90 percent African-American. But the fact of the matter is he's been held up or his employees seven times. I think that would make you a little nervous yourself. If you had a gun pointed at you seven times.
COSTELLO: That's true. Sheriff Michael Bouchard of Oakland County, Michigan. Thank you so much for being with me this morning. I do appreciate it, sir.
BOUCHARD: Thank you. One thing I would like to add is --
COSTELLO: Uh-huh. Oh, I'm sorry about that. We didn't do that on purpose. Sheriff go ahead, you'd like to add something?
BOUCHARD: Yes, I mean relationships, police/community relationships are that. They're relationships. So if people have something where they think something was wrong or they're treated unfairly, please call us. Please call your local police department. Create that dialogue. Relationships are communication.
We would have sat down with this individual, walked through the 911 tapes, explained the whole thing. He may not have been happy but at least the dialogue is there and the relationship is there. That I think is critically important. We would like to know where people think something's not right.
In fact, I'm not proud to say that we have investigated, criminally charged and terminated a couple of officers in the last year. Having said that, when a deputy does their job, it's my job to stand by them.
COSTELLO: Sheriff Bouchard, thanks so much once again. I appreciate it.
BOUCHARD: Thank you.
COSTELLO: Still to come in the newsroom, did using Apple's iPod force you to pay more for your music? That's what a federal lawsuit claims. We'll talk about that next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COSTELLO: John Kerry is promising the United States and its allies it will fight ISIS for as long as it takes. He's speaking about the United States, of course. The Secretary of state chairing the first ever anti-ISIS meeting of coalition ministers at NATO's headquarters in Brussels. He's holding a news conference right now.
Leaders and dignitaries from more than 60 countries are listening in. They're talking about how to crush ISIS on the battlefield and how to stop young men and women from all over the world from joining the terrorist group.
Syrian president Bashar al Assad, by the way, says he has seen no sign that U.S.-led air strikes are weakening ISIS. He told the French magazine "Paris Match" there's been no change.
We'll continue to monitor that event in Brussels and keep you posted.
On to other news now, tech giant Apple is on trial in California facing claims it illegally blocked competition during the early days of its iPod music player. And that forced its users -- like you and me -- to pay higher prices. The star witness in the case may surprise you. That would be the now-deceased Apple CEO Steve Jobs. So let's talk about this.
CNN correspondent Dan Simon is in San Francisco and CNN legal analyst Paul Callan joins me as well. Dan, let's start with you. Tell us about this suit.
DAN SIMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Carol, if you look at today's situation, digital music is pretty much a commodity. You can get it from any number of services and play it on an infinite number of devices. But if you go back ten years, the iPod was the king. It had 70 percent market share in the portable music player market and they had a monopoly, according to this lawsuit.
And they were able to keep this monopoly, according to the suit, by not allowing you to play other music purchased from other digital music store fronts. You had to get it from iTunes. We asked the plaintiff's attorney what's wrong with that. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PATRICK COUGHLIN, PLAINTIFF'S ATTORNEY: There's nothing inherently wrong with having a closed system. You can make that decision, that business decision. What you can't do is to try to hold on to your monopoly if you gain one through that system. STEVE JOBS, FORMER CEO, APPLE: The most popular mp3 player in the
world. Matter of fact, we just introduced some new ones and they're even thinner and lighter.
SIMON: How much of this case hinges on Steve Jobs' behavior?
COUGLIN: In one sense a lot of it hinges on it because the evidence that we have ties him to the top in implementing the scheme essentially to knock out the competition. I mean it starts at the top, the very top with him.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SIMON: And the plaintiffs' lawyers have already presented evidence. They've shown e-mails from Steve Jobs showing that he was deeply concerned about competition in this space and that he wanted to keep the iPod sort of in this walled off garden. This is going to be a case that's going to last for about six or seven days. We're talking about $350 million at stake here, Carol -- so not a ton of money for Apple when you consider that it did $180 billion in sales last year. Nonetheless it could be significant for consumers -- Carol.
COSTELLO: I hope so. Dan, stay right there. I'm going to bring in Paul. So Steve Jobs is testifying from the grave. It sounds so creepy.
PAUL CALLAN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Very, very strange, isn't it?
COSTELLO: It is. So will this help or hurt Apple's case?
CALLAN: You know, it's interesting because Steve Jobs often said things that were very damaging to Apple. It was kind of like he didn't care. It would be sort of like the lawyer sitting down with Thomas Edison telling him how he should talk about the light bulb and Steve Jobs was the same way. It was -- you know, he would talk about his product the way he wanted to talk about it.
And getting, of course, to the facts of this case, the iPod was so unusual and so dominated the market instantly when it came into being. And when it first came out you could play anything on the iPod. And, of course, subsequent versions they changed the software so you could only play Apple songs that you downloaded from the iTunes store -- right.
And they said and this lawsuit says, hey, you weren't trying to improve the product. You were trying to monopolize the market because everybody was buying these devices. And, of course, Jobs said some things that would hurt the defense of the case and that's why it's being played.
COSTELLO: It's not like Jobs can be cross-examined in any way.
CALLAN: Well, he is cross-examined at the deposition. As a matter of fact, these depositions tend to go on for a long time, they're very aggressive. And then the plaintiff's attorney in presenting the deposition can pick the segments that he wants to play and, of course, the defense then can play other segments. So it's almost like he's in the courtroom.
COSTELLO: It's not like Apple doesn't have a history with these kinds of lawsuits. There was the e-book price fixing suit in 2012, a wage fixing lawsuit for Apple employees. So that's certainly going to enter into things, right?
CALLAN: Well, yes, it does enter into things but I think in the end, I'm thinking back to law school. The two hardest subjects were tax and antitrust. Why antitrust? It's so difficult to understand.
And jurors are going to look at this case, I think, and say, you know something, Apple is really one of the iron pillars of the American economy. They supply a lot of jobs, why shouldn't they be able to be as competitive as they want and put the other guy out of business. So you kind of have that lurking in the background and I'm wondering how much anybody's going to punish Apple for making a good product.
COSTELLO: Ok. So let's just play a game and say Apple's going to be punished. Dan, you said that might benefit consumers. How?
SIMON: Well, if you're one of those people who purchased an iPod from 2006 to 2009 and according to this class action suit there are eight million of those people, you could be entitled to some money. We're not talking about a significant amount of money, it could be somewhere in the neighborhood of anywhere from $16 to $20. But it is something.
But it could be real money for resellers. Stores like the now defunct Circuit City. They went bankrupt but they could be entitled to millions of dollars so it could be significant here.
COSTELLO: Wow.
CALLAN: I'll tell you who else it will be real money for, the lawyers because they get a percentage of the recovery and the guys flying around in those Gulf Stream jet planes, those lawyers do these kinds of lawsuits. So that's how that works.
COSTELLO: I would make a lawyer joke but I won't because I like you, Paul Callan.
CALLAN: Thank you, Carol.
COSTELLO: Paul Callan and Dan Simon, many thanks.
Checking other top stories for you at 49 minutes past the hour, is a woman detained in Lebanon really the wife of ISIS Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or not? Iraq is now saying no. Regional sources close to the capture initially told CNN that Lebanese forces arrested the ISIS leader's wife. Some U.S. officials believe it was actually an ex-wife.
A Staten Island New York grand jury is expected to decide today whether to indict a white police officer in the choke hold death of a black man. Eric Garner died in the July confrontation. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide. Protests have so far been peaceful. New York police say they are prepared to keep the peace no matter the decision. I'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COSTELLO: I feel so mean laughing at this. Have you seen the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's new Christmas card? Let me show you. Here it is. Let's see it.
Let's just say we won't be placing it on our mantle. Actually this makes me like Tony Blair even more because it shows he's wonderfully human, right? The uncomfortable hand placement, the seemingly forced smiles -- the Internet of course, had a little fun. How could it not with something this awkward.
One Twitter users swapped faces with the famous American gothic. Another claims Blair's teeth follow him around the room. It's the UK's version of the nightmare before Christmas and we just had to share it with you.
It says what better time for Jeanne Moos, right?
Ever heard of a getaway skateboard? We hadn't, either, until a suspect in a police chase got caught up in traffic. CNN's Jeanne Moos has the story.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JEANNE MOOS, CNN SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT: It started out as just another Los Angeles police chase, a stolen BMW driving in the wrong lane against traffic doing 90 miles an hour at one point, weaving and squeezing and then -- boom.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He just crashed.
MOOS: But the rear ending wasn't the surprise ending to this story. Lugging a getaway skateboard was. The alleged car thief ran across three lanes of traffic clutching the long board and then came the move worthy of a movie. If only it had worked.
For five seconds, the suspect tried to skateboard away from officers in hot pursuit on foot. Experienced skateboarders we talked to gave the suspect low marks. His technique was described as "not very good", the chase "hysterical".
Back on foot, he ran into trouble when a red pickup tried to block his path. He went around it and then, as police were closing in, the same red pickup cut him off and practically pinned him.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Whoa. Who's that guy?
MOOS: that is the former star of a now-canceled reality show. There's the truck. Luis "Lou" Pizarro used to run around dramatizing car repossessions.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stop playing around, ok?
MOOS: So it seemed natural to help real cops get their man.
LOU PIZARRO, STOPPED FLEEING SUSPECT: It's just instinct just to, you know, block the guy off.
MOOS: 33-year-old Jesus Zamora was charged with auto theft. Police recovered the skateboard -- presumably for evidence -- though an officer did play footsy with it.
You know, a skateboard isn't what that guy needed. What that guy need was this.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's on a hover board.
MOOS: But if this guy had one of those, don't hover, take cover.
Jeanne Moos, CNN --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Who's that guy?
MOOS: New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COSTELLO: Weird, right? Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm Carol Costello.
"@THIS HOUR WITH BERMAN AND MICHAELA" after a break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
