1101 replies to this topic

[LFC]

From a piece called Some Thoughts on Eric Garner in the Washington Post, there's a section on bad police officers that keep their jobs. Here's one about an officer in Florida that is finally off the force after being convicted of some serious charges:

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Let us quickly recount the glorious career of German Bosque, Florida's worst cop. He was arrested three times and fired five times. He was probed more than 40 times by internal affairs, including 16 cases involving serious battery and excessive force. He tried to board an airplane with a loaded gun, got caught with coke and counterfeit cash in his police car, was charged with domestic violence, lied to his bosses, and made up police reports.

And through it all, he kept his job and avoided serious trouble. Until now! The Opa-locka sergeant was convicted last night of felony false imprisonment and witness tampering for assaulting a local youth counselor.

And here's an incompetent officer who would leave one department under a cloud and then manage to get hired by another!

When you have bad teachers who can't get fired, you can screw up children's education for a year. When you have a bad police office who can't get fired, you can destroy their lives, sometimes literally.

[Progressive whisperer]

Another from the Dish:

http://dish.andrewsu...-police-unions/

Among other things, it appears that Costa Mesa CA police unions hired private investigators to frame elected officials in a pension fight. I hate union busting, but the police unions are out of control, and about the only unions places like Wisconsin will NOT go after. Need someone to keep the plebs in line.

[Traveler]

Unions are not an ummixed blessing

[LFC]

More problem behavior for the police. First, there's video of an NYC officer running up and punching a suspect who is pinned and under control on the hood of a car. The kid is supposedly 12 and he, along with an accomplice, apparently assault somebody with a cane. If they get off because of this, the officer should not only be tossed off the force and charged with assault, he should also be charged with interfering with police.


That piece links to one from Austin, Texas.

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In the video, the officers are conversing and joking about work, when one officer notices a woman walking by. The first officer says, "Look at that girl over there."

The second cop then blows a whistle and says, "Go ahead and call the cops. They can’t un-rape you."

Both officers seem to laugh, and then the first officer says, "You didn’t turn your camera off, did you?"

The second officer then repeats, "They can't un-rape you."

Here's another one from Texas where an officer, in a totally unprompted rant, goes off on the Ray Rice case to a female report. Being a reporter, she audio recorded him. DUH! What an idiot.

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According to audio captured by [Joy] Diaz, Petrowski offered an unprompted take on the case of NFL running back Ray Rice, who knocked out his then-fianceé in an elevator in February.

"I don't care who you are," Petrowski said on the recording. "You think about the women's movement today, [women say] 'Oh, we want to go [into] combat,' and then, 'We want equal pay, and we want this.'"

"You want to go fight in combat and sit in a foxhole? You go right ahead. But a man can't hit you in public here? Bullshit!" the officer continued.

"You act like a whore, you get treated like one!" he added on the tape.

[Progressive whisperer]

LFC, on 19 December 2014 - 03:21 PM, said:

More problem behavior for the police. First, there's video of an NYC officer running up and punching a suspect who is pinned and under control on the hood of a car. The kid is supposedly 12 and he, along with an accomplice, apparently assault somebody with a cane. If they get off because of this, the officer should not only be tossed off the force and charged with assault, he should also be charged with interfering with police.


That piece links to one from Austin, Texas.




Here's another one from Texas where an officer, in a totally unprompted rant, goes off on the Ray Rice case to a female report. Being a reporter, she audio recorded him. DUH! What an idiot.

You know, if I were a police officer I'd want asshats like that gone, just so I didn't have tell non-cop friends and family that I wasn't like that, most cops are ok, etc.

Instead the "blue wall" calls on all cops to make a united front alongside the worst examples.

Yeah, Doctors and Lawyers tend to do the same thing too.

[AnBr]

This is what I don't get. You would think the honest cops would want to call out the bad actors.

[D. C. Sessions]

AnBr, on 19 December 2014 - 04:09 PM, said:

This is what I don't get. You would think the honest cops would want to call out the bad actors.

That only works if they're confident that can win the civil war.

[D. C. Sessions]

Here's one to make dsp happy:

http://www.myfoxhous...n-swat-incident

[AnBr]

D. C. Sessions, on 20 December 2014 - 07:45 AM, said:

That only works if they're confident that can win the civil war.

That would suggest that the good ones are in the minority.

[D. C. Sessions]

AnBr, on 20 December 2014 - 12:30 PM, said:

That would suggest that the good ones are in the minority.

Not necessarily. It could just mean that they don't have enough power (including key positions, ability to recruit powerful outside allies such as District Attorneys, etc.) to win something other than a Pyrrhic victory. Don't forget that they are dependent on their jobs to support their families and that, by definition, the "bad guys" play rough and dirty.

[AnBr]

Not the first time that Serpico was invoked in all of this mess.

[D. C. Sessions]

AnBr, on 20 December 2014 - 12:52 PM, said:

Not the first time that Serpico was invoked in all of this mess.

How'd that end up the first time?

[AnBr]

Someone linked to an article he wrote in regards to the current rash of police thuggery. http://www.politico....tml#.VJXWHP8WDB

[LFC]

Here's another problem case where no charges ended up being filed. For DSP, it does not sounds like there's a particular racial component to this one, just an incompetence one. Bold below is mine.

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Manney shot 31-year-old Hamilton on April 30 after responding to a call for a welfare check on a man sleeping in a downtown park. Manney said Hamilton resisted when he tried to frisk him. The two exchanged punches before Hamilton got a hold of Manney's baton and hit him on the neck with it, the former officer has said. Manney then opened fire, hitting Hamilton 14 times.

Several witnesses told police they saw Hamilton holding Manney's baton "in an aggressive posture" before Manney shot him, according to Chisholm's news release.

Hamilton's family said he suffered from schizophrenia and had recently stopped taking his medication.

Police Chief Edward Flynn fired Manney in October. He said at the time that Manney correctly identified Hamilton as mentally ill, but ignored his training and department policy and treated him as a criminal by frisking him.

EDIT: If all this is true, I applaud the Police Chief for having the courage to fire an officer whose inappropriate actions lead to a senseless death.

[D. C. Sessions]

Glass half empty?

At least Manney got fired and the department takes mental illness cases seriously. Aside from the triggering event (the frisk) it's not obvious that he was as far off the mark as a lot of the cases we've been seeing. Although I must say 14 shots shouldn't have been necessary regardless.

[LFC]

D. C. Sessions, on 22 December 2014 - 02:46 PM, said:

Although I must say 14 shots shouldn't have been necessary regardless.

I think these triggering events are actually critical to assessing these events. He woke a sleeping schizophrenic at 3:00 AM in a public park and started frisking him. The chances of escalation were immediately baked in, which is why department policy (obviously written by smarter people) is to approach this situation differently. If an officer is validly under attack, I don't care if the officer took 4 or 14 shots. But if the officer precipitated the events, they are at least partly if not mostly culpable.

This is the same issue I still have with the Eric Garner case, and I still haven't been able to find out what really happened before the video started. Those supporting the police say he was placed under arrest and that's that. If the police had a warrant or saw him actively engaged in a crime, they are correct. If they had no warrant and no evidence of a crime, then they have to take on not just part of the blame but the lion's share.

No citizen should be expected to submit meekly to authority when placed under arrest for no reason. What we need is a reasonable recourse to false arrest and abuse of power that actually works, like a real investigation afterward with real penalties against the offending officer. If their job was potentially in jeopardy, they would be more careful about pushing somebody around just because they were in a bad mood or get their rocks off by hassling people.

[Progressive whisperer]

A majority of Americans, including indepentants, but mostly white Anericans, beleive that the police don't treat non-whites differently from whites:

http://www.lawyersgu...t-state-obvious

[Traveler]

Unrepentant independents as well.

[LFC]

Vox has a piece on the dangers of being an officer. As we've discussed here at TRS before, it's not even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs. Additionally, a number of annual officer deaths occur due to other circumstances, such as traffic and even training fatalities. They use the term "felonious killings" to separate those caused by humans. The rate has generally been pretty low. Here's the chart for killings per 100,000 officers. There are other interesting charts in the full piece.

[LFC]

NYC has also instituted a new policy on small amounts of marijuana (less than 25 grams) which result in a ticket rather than an arrest. This is good on multiple levels but especially from this particularly egregious NYPD behavior.

Quote

While marijuana possession has been decriminalized in New York since 1977, the NYPD had skirted the rule by having suspects turn out their pockets, bringing their pot into “open view.”

Anything to get around the law, right officers?