A former San Jose police officer was sentenced to five years in federal prison for possession of child pornography, five years after officers discovered the images while searching his computer for evidence of plots to kill police officers, judges, liberals and minorities.
U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila on Friday handed down the sentence for Denis Shevchenko, 45, of Gilroy, after finding him guilty last October following a bench trial in federal court in San Jose.
Shevchenko had been indicted by a federal grand jury in June 2022.
The indictment followed his arrest in November 2021, after officers discovered child pornography on Shevchenko’s home computer.
At the time of his arrest, Shevchenko was employed as a civilian community service officer with the San Jose Police Department. Prosecutors said that before his civilian job, Shevchenko had worked as a San Jose police officer and as an officer with the Pinole Police Department.
Court documents showed that the investigation into Shevchenko began when FBi agents traced violent, threatening, anonymous alt-right statements on gab.com to his home computer.
According to officers’ affidavits presented to the court to obtain a search warrant, the online posts included the following:
• “It’s time to start shooting the ‘police’ who stand against the people. ….Any person would be justified in shooting them dead….Hunt them all down.”.
• “Of course, crazy, divorced, subhuman libtards …must be culled indiscriminately, no matter their age or ‘orientation,’ so our children don’t have to deal with those parasites.”
• “I call for the eradication of the black robed despots…. I no longer recognize their authority, and consider these third worlders from our nation. …Subhumans. … Cull them like vermin, to better our society, improve life for our families, and our children’s future.”
The agents didn’t find what they were looking for in that raid five years ago, but said that the electronic devices seized from Shevchenko’s home contained “numerous videos and thousands of images of child pornography.”
The search allowed by the warrants yielded an assault rifle at his home, and a loaded handgun in his locker at the South San Jose police substation, authorities said at the time.
Initial state misdemeanor charges on the weapons violations were later superseded by the federal child pornography charge.
Abuse in early life, sexual or otherwise, left unhindered typically causes the brain to improperly develop. It can readily be the starting point of a life in which the brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammatory stress hormones and chemicals, even in otherwise non-stressful daily routines.
It amounts to non-physical-impact brain damage in the form of CPTSD.
Among other dysfunctions, it has been described as an emotionally tumultuous daily existence, indeed an almost-continuous discomforting expectation or anticipation of ‘the other shoe dropping’. And it can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is prescription and/or illicitly medicated.
Therefore, the wellbeing of all children needs to be of genuine importance to everyone — and not just concern over what other parents’ children might or will cost us as future criminals or costly cases of government care, etcetera — regardless of how well our own developing children are doing.
Mindlessly ‘minding our own business’ often proves humanly devastating. Largely owing to the Only If It’s In My Own Back Yard mindset, however, the prevailing collective attitude (implicit or subconscious) basically follows: ‘Why should I care — my kids are alright?’ or (the even more lamely self-serving) ‘What’s in it for me as a taxpayer?’
As a moral rule, being caring, competent, loving parents — and, not to mention, knowledgeable about factual child-development science — should matter most when deciding to procreate. Afterall, a physically and mentally safe future should be every child’s fundamental right, especially when considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter — particularly one in which the parents too often stop loving each other, frequently fight and eventually divorce.
Yet, many people still hold a misplaced yet strong sense of entitlement when it comes to misperceiving and treating children largely as obedient property to use or abuse.
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“It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practicing medicine, ‘I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood’.”
—Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal