Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III was interviewed for a “60 Minutes” piece on Tasers that aired Sunday night.

Bealefeld expressed some skepticism about the electric shock devices, saying he was “not a fan” and that he feared they could be used as a “short-cutted method” for getting people to comply.

Bealefeld said that less than 500 Tasers have been issued to the department’s 2,800 sworn members.

Even so, the department has at least two lawsuits pending against it for allegedly using Tasers unnecessarily. Leon Coley, a 66-year-old man with heart ailments, sued two police officers last month, saying they shocked him with a Taser twice while he was sitting on his couch in his home. According to the suit, the officers were responding to a phone call from Coley’s wife, who was in a verbal argument with Coley.

The department is also currently in litigation with Carl Jackson, a disabled Navy veteran with ”skeletal issues” who says two officers assaulted him and shocked him with a Taser outside his home “without reason or cause” in June 2010.

Watch the video from “60 Minutes” Sunday night:

Baltimore City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young has made a habit recently of voting against settlements for police misconduct lawsuits, saying that better training would prevent many of the costly suits.

But Young voted for the $245,000 settlement for former police helicopter pilot Samuel K. Miller that was approved unanimously at Wednesday’s Board of Estimates meeting. Miller had accused his superiors in the Aviation Unit of ostracizing him and tricking him into resigning in 2007 after he wrote a letter that detailed waste and misuse of the unit’s resources, including a “dog and pony show” helicopter landing at the school of the unit commander’s children.

After voting with his colleagues to approve Miller’s settlement, Young called Miller a “whistleblower.”

“I respect that,” Young said. “He should not have been disciplined or lost his job because of that.”

Young voted against a $45,000 settlement for Rodney Hueston, whose lawsuit alleged officers Anthony S. Weems and Renard D. Owens broke his left arm during an unlawful arrest in 2009. Charges of resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and possession of an open container of alcohol were dropped against Hueston after he was treated for his injuries.

Hueston’s settlement was approved despite Young’s “No” vote.

U.S. District Court Senior Judge Marvin J. Garbis gave no indication whether he would allow Ravens’ “Flying B” logo designer Frederick E. Bouchat to add the makers of the Madden NFL 11 video game to his copyright infringement suit against the team and the NFL in a hearing Tuesday.

But Garbis, a lifelong Baltimorean and football fan, did display solid knowledge of Ravens’ history, except for one minor slip-up.

The hearing also focused on the use of Bouchat’s logo in Ravens’ highlights films from 1996-1998 and whether the NFL can continue to sell the films without compensating Bouchat.

Garbis, born in Baltimore in 1936 and a graduate of Johns Hopkins according to his bio, pointed out that the focus of the films ”is not to show the logo. It’s to show Ray Lewis.”

Touchdown for Garbis on that one. Lewis was one of the original Ravens after the team took him and Jonathan Ogden in the first round of the 1996 NFL Draft (pretty savvy selecting by the front office). Lewis led the team in tackles as a rookie in 1996 and made the Pro Bowl in 1997 and 1998, so he certainly would have been a focus of the highlight films in question.

The NFL’s attorneys argued that the market for the films at this point is minimal and Garbis seemed to agree, saying they’d only appeal to people who “wanted to relive the good old days. Which for us were actually the bad old days.”

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Some next-day thoughts on the unexpected outcome of the two-and-a-half-day bankruptcy hearing of Alter Communications, publisher of the Baltimore Jewish Times (in which the judge rejected the restructuring plans of both Alter and its printer-turned-creditor, H.G. Roebuck & Son Inc.):

The federal judge in the case, James F. Schneider, lightened the proceedings several times with his ultra-dry wit. At one point Maria Ellena Chavez-Ruark, Alter’s attorney, was reading back word-for-word Schneider’s decision to confirm Alter’s plan in December — a decision that was later overturned by a higher court.

“It sounds so good and yet the (U.S.) District Court reversed it,” Schneider interrupted with a wistful sigh. “Such lovely prose.”

But when it came time for Schneider to make his decision he turned deathly serious, calling out not only the parties involved for their two years of bitter litigation but also their attorneys for attempting to play on his emotions.

Schneider prefaced his remarks by saying he thought Ruark and Roebuck’s attorneys, William L. Hallam and Kevin J. Pascale were some of the finest lawyers he knew. The judge then proceeded to scold them for “the extent they’ve gotten so close to the facts and issues of this case that they’ve lost their objectivity and taken on the personas of their  clients.”

Ouch.

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Registration is reportedly full for today”s University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law School convocation featuring U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

But never fear: Daily Record reporter Andy Marso (that would be me), will be live-tweeting the event. Follow me, @andymarso, or catch my re-tweets from@mddailyrecord.

Sotomayor became the first Hispanic justice in 2009 and the third woman to sit on the top court. She’s also the first Supreme Court justice to visit UM law since Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2002.

“Great morning, everyone,” Baltimore City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young said in calling to order today’s giddy, post-election Board of Estimates meeting.

There was plenty of back-slapping between Young and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, whose victories were nearly as dominant as the Ravens’ beatdown of the Steelers two days ago. The normally staid mayor also wryly congratulated comptroller Joan M. Pratt on her “hard-fought” re-election (Pratt ran unopposed).

But once the good vibes died down and the council bit into the meat of the meeting, Young disagreed with the rest of his colleagues on a $30,000 police misconduct settlement , casting the lone “no” vote as the settlement slid through on the consent agenda.

Though it was a relatively small settlement, Young spokesman Lester Davis said the council president wants to send a message that the city is spending too much on police misconduct claims as a whole. He said Young thinks the police department should provide better training to prevent the legitimate claims and the city should be more willing to go to court and fully challenge less solid claims.

“He’s been pretty consistent in terms of wanting to get his message across,” Davis said. “For him, it’s just a belief that the city can not afford to continue to pay out this money.”

According to the city’s Law Department, the city spent $7.25 million settling police misconduct claims between mid-2007 and mid-2010.

Thomas Maettig says Millersville con man Bill Hillar’s U.S. Army Special Forces impersonation scheme wasn’t necessarily as sophisticated as one would expect, given that he fooled at least 24 organizations — including the FBI — over a period of 12 years.

Hillar, whose real military experience consisted of eight years in the Coast Guard Reserves, was sentenced to 21 months in prison Tuesday after pleading guilty to wire fraud for using fake credentials to make $170,000 teaching counter-terrorism and human trafficking courses to colleges, universities and law enforcement agencies including the FBI and DEA.

He got away with it until a real special forces veteran obtained Hillar’s military records and outed him online in October 2010.

But Maettig, who took Hillar’s one-credit counter-terrorism course at the Monterey Institute for International Studies in 2007, said there were warning signs long before that.

“Red flags — yes, many,” Maettig wrote in an email from Nigeria, where he now works for a German non-profit. ”His course was absolutely devoid of content. He spent hours requesting our expectations and ideas about what we would like to discuss in the following 1.5 days and didn’t get back to it at all. He wasted time. He had us conduct a pointless self-assessment test and spent hours talking about his personal experience. Basically, the class had no content and no structure.”

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