It is no secret that American police rarely observe the laws of the land when out wilding with each other, and as any candid criminal judge will tell you, perjury is often their native tongue in court.– Gore Vidal, Shredding the Bill of Rights, Vanity Fair, 1998
From the NY Times report on the Dubose murder:
Another university officer who arrived shortly after the shooting, Eric Weibel, wrote in his report that Officer Tensing had told him that “he was being dragged by the vehicle and had to fire his weapon,” and that “Officer Tensing stated that he was almost run over.” A third officer, he wrote, said he had seen Officer Tensing being dragged.
Here is the disturbing video in HD quality:
Now, after watching that, some questions.
1.) What is the name and badge number of the officer who wrote that he saw Officer Tensing being dragged.
2.) Is he/she still on the job? If so, why?
3.) Was this is an official report? If so, has he/she been charged with the relevant crime whether it be perjury, filing a false report?
4.) Have you begun to re-investigate past accusations of wrongdoing on her/his part? Why not?
Bad cops aren’t a one off. It comes from a culture of permissiveness, mutual reinforcement, and covering each other’s backs with lies. There is a reason it is called the the thin blue line and not the thin blue dot.
This doesn’t start and stop with Tensing.
*** Update ***
Here is the incident report (.podf). The lying officer is Phillip Kidd. More here.
C.V. Danes
What he meant, see, is that he felt like he was being dragged into shooting the guy, not that he was shooting because he got dragged. Simple misunderstanding is all.
A guy
What was the guy in the car reaching for? And should the cop have just trusted it was the license the dude said he had but didn’t have?
JCJ
That was awful.
chopper
@A guy:
Is that why he shot him in the head while he was driving off?
John Cole
@A guy: He wasn’t reaching for anything. Both his hands were clearly visible on the door the officer was trying to jerk open when all he had told Dubose to do was take off his seat belt.
JPL
All I know is that the Cincy tv stations, showed the shooting in slo-mo and the officer will be able to get a fair trial.
He might not like the results, but it will be a fairer trial than Dubose got.
Tensing was trying to claim that the person he killed, accelerated while dead and almost ran him over. Okey dokey. His attorney will have a difficult time explaining that.
RandomMonster
Am I reading that video correctly: the dude starts his engine while the cop is questioning him, the cop draws his weapon, and then shoots him as the guy stomps on the gas? Why was it necessary to draw a weapon in this case?
Belafon
@chopper: I think Dubose was shot before the car started moving.
A guy
It appears h e shot him when he tried to pull the door back shut and reached to his right.
Anthony
@A guy:
What reaching? His right hand is on the shifter and his left is in the air.
JPL
@chopper: His car accelerated after he was dead. He died instantly and fell with his foot on the pedal.
The officer shot him because he started his car and said I didn’t do anything wrong.
singfoom
Protect and serve has become comply (immediately, regardless of the situation or the order) or die.
@A guy: So you think cops should act like Ned on South Park? “It’s coming right for us!” BLAM BLAM.
Don’t know about you, but I think police should be held to a higher standard.
JPL
@RandomMonster: At the point the car accelerated, he was dead.
John Cole
@A guy: Not to mention you are missing the entire point of this post in your post hoc excuse making for the cop, which is that here we have video evidence of not one, but two lying cops.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
Tensing was clearly in fear for his life. Did you see how big Dubose was?
Thoughtcrime
@John Cole:
John, he’s not missing any point. He came here to do this: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/07/24/golf-course-in-norway-phantom-pooper_n_7864736.html
mclaren
All cops are bad cops. There is no such thing as a “good cop” or a “bad cop,” only a large criminal gang of lawless thugs who wear blue uniforms and shoot and beat and tase anyone who offends them even slightly.
If you want to know where all the bullies in your high school went, the punks who used to set cats on fire and bash smaller kids’ teeth in using toilet bowls, the kids who used to yank girls bra straps until they broke and then laughed uproariously in the hallways between classes, those punks all became cops.
Every.
Last.
One.
A guy
What did the cop see and perceive in real time from a guy who couldn’t even adequately explain the status of his license and refused to follow instructions. Hey I hope the family wins the lawsuit and moves to Beverly Hills but this video doesn’t convince me of anything
Admiral_Komack
@A guy: Gee, maybe we could ask him?
Too late!
He was murdered by a piece of shit cop.
A guy
Singfoom- I’ve never seen South Park. Heard of it but never seen it
John Cole
@A guy: You are an idiot. And blind, possibly.
Belafon
@A guy: What we saw was a guy with a gun who thought he had the authority to shoot someone in the head for refusing to step out of the car. And he thought he could get away with it by making up the story about being dragged.
japa21
@A guy: One thing we can be sure he didn’t see is a threat to his own safety. That’s number one. Secondly, there was no justification for the officer to have him get out of the car, at least none given.
Thirdly, if you really believe what you say, then there’s no hope.
And that comment about Beverly Hills says something rather ugly about you.
Ajabu
@A guy:
Who gives a fuck what he thought he could “see and perceive”?
The real time REALITY is he made a bogus stop, outside his jurisdiction and then got pissed because this instructions weren’t complied with instantly and murdered the non-compliant citizen.
Nothing extenuating about that.
But thanks for the whitesplaining.
yet another jeff
Fuck…dead and crashed and still hitting the rev limiter. Fucking cops.
Cain
@A guy:
Who gives a shit about what the state of his license was? Whatever it was, it did not merit dying by being shot in the head. A person doesn’t always have to be compliant, they have rights. The officer could have just issued a ticket for the car to the owner of the car and have them summoned to court.
Mike J
It was pretty clear that the suspect had a Pershing missile.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
from the NYT article
as well, according to Justice Department surveys. Most private colleges employ only non-sworn officers who do not have guns. […]
Mr. Dubose, 43, a father of 10, was just south of the university campus, driving a green 1998 Honda Accord without a front license plate, at about 6:30 p.m. when Officer Tensing began following him, according to an account that Jason Goodrich, chief of the university police, gave on Monday. Moments later, the officer pulled Mr. Dubose over on a side street a few blocks from the campus.
This astounds me. Why? What is their training? To whom are they accountable? Where does the oversight come from? How do they have jurisdiction on public streets?
Are we gonna find out, yet again, that this guy was rejected by the big city PD? I guess we can be glad it never occurred to wanna-be cop George Zimmerman that he just needed to find a lower bar to lumber over.
JPL
Fortunately, the jury will be able to view the film in slow motion and I’m sure the prosecution will freeze the frames so even the idiots on the jury, like a guy will understand what happened.
dopey-o
@mclaren:
Objection, over-broad generalization. There are good cops, they just don’t speak up because they are afraid of the bad cops.
tones
Well obviously not having a license on your person is now a death penalty offense.
Along with any other non obeisance toward Johnny Law.
I would swear it was not that way before…
SiubhanDuinne
@John Cole:
There’s a shocker.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@John Cole: Nah, trolly knows exactly what he’s doing
Hal
No one is asking for the police to sacrifice themselves on the alter of public service, but the standard for use of deadly force should be much higher. Being an officer is voluntary and the mental competency of officers everywhere should be of the highest standards. “I though my life was in danger” should not be the end all, be all, of the conversation.
Ultraviolet Thunder
Looks pretty clear cut to me. But I’m willing to let justice take its course and accept a legitimate verdict.
If I had to lay money I’d say that cop has seen his life’s last day of freedom.
Belafon
@tones: I believe you’re missing the skin color part. Jim Crow, for instance, wasn’t carried out by just the private citizens.
dogwood
Well if everyone’s gonna respond to Mr. a guy, this thread will be off the rails. He usually doesn’t get much attention.
Mike J
@Ultraviolet Thunder: I’m sure he’ll be out on bail until the trial.
Schlemazel
@John Cole: How long have you been doing this blog gig John? After all this time you can’t smell the troll stench? the cum wad knows he is intentionally ignoring reality because to admit reality would be to admit his entire life is a lie & a mistake.
WereBear
Can’t watch the video. But since when do they arm University police?
End stage of conservative paranoia. And we all suffer.
And I hope it’s the end stage!
Belafon
@dogwood:
@Schlemazel:
This one’s pretty good because he sounds almost reasonable. He appeals to that “if I can make just the right argument” part of us.
japa21
@mclaren: That is probably one of the stupidist comments I have seen on BJ, and considering folks like “a guy” and Knowbody, that is saying something. Maybe you would like to have a further discussion with this cop, who, by the way, is a somewhat regular around here:
https://balloon-juice.com/2015/07/29/tensing-indicted-in-cincy/#comment-5421731
A guy
Cole- I may be an idiot and I hate when I go to the office without my cheaters. But I am sure I can get the guy acquitted of a murder charge.
magurakurin
@japa21:
He doesn’t believe what he says…but there’s no hope for him anyway.
Patricia Kayden
@Belafon: And would have gotten away with it absent the body camera. There’s no justification for the shooting — racists be damned.
raven
@WereBear: Always. Ever hear of Virginia Tech? Northern Illinois?
JPL
The prosecutor seemed to think that most police officers are still good, and I believe that also. If they don’t rid themselves of the scum, though, it’s going to be more difficult for me to keep the faith.
Talk radio is all over the bad teacher in timbuktu but seems to ignore this issue. I wonder why that is.
Mike J
@Patricia Kayden:
He hasn’t been convicted yet. He may still get away with it.
JPL
@japa21: He’s a troll.. Always has been.
lamh36
@Patricia Kayden: I’m glad the sister of Dubose got up to the press stand to make sure and reiterate that point.
a reporter asked her mom or her other brother what made their case different than the others. And she said “the video” and she made sure to mention how the media and the cops were trying her brother in media.
magurakurin
@John Cole:
You don’t come down here into the muck often enough. We deal with this assholes shit day in and day out. Must be nice…in the rear with the gear.
cheers and thanks for the blog as always ;)
Patricia Kayden
@JPL: Hate to say this but there are some jurors who will still feel that the shooting was justified. Remember the first Rodney King trial. Hopefully the jury is diverse.
raven
@magurakurin: If all these dumbness would ignore these douchebags they’d go away. But NO, people have to prove how fucking smart they are and talk to them.
magurakurin
@JPL: McLaren isn’t a troll. McLaren is McLaren. Been here longer than many. McLaren is our Cecil the Lion. Still best not to get to deep down in the weeds with her though.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I wish to register an objection on behalf of Cecil. Should I email Cole? Or consult the FAQs?
magurakurin
@raven: yeah, I always like to go with the Raven Rule…
FIDO
works well.
magurakurin
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
If you hurry you might catch that international man of mystery himself John Austin Cole…he was just here…
Patricia Kayden
@dopey-o: Are you good if you don’t speak up about the bad?
WereBear
@raven: Guess I haven’t been to enough universities. Lately.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
They have to have the same training as any other police officer in Ohio. Their authority comes from this law:
They have jurisdiction within the university and they’re state officers They also have “mutual aid” agreements where the city or town can grant them jurisdiction outside the university with language like “while in the course of their duties as state university law enforcement officers”.
They have another one for private colleges
http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/1713.50
celticdragonchick
Well, the sociopaths at Officer.com are busy fapping over how the rest of us cop haters simply don’t see how the scary black guy was trying to kill the cop.
Oh, and the DA needs to be fired, and we don’t deserve good police anyway and dammit the SCOTUS ruled that cops can do what the fuck they want when they get mad and we can’t second guess how scared they say they felt when they write it all up after getting their stories straight.
Another Holocene Human
Don’t forget the Supreme Court. When Vidal was writing we were maybe almost a decade into a reign of error in which the Bill of Rights was systemically shredded. Without the courts providing a check to dirty cops, is it any wonder the system is so messed up? Most prosecutors are intimately locked with the cops so help won’t come from that quarter, and political solutions are spotty and localized at best. (For example Cincinnati had this agreement that has led to good community police relations while in the same state Cleveland has been wholesale hiring psycho rejects from other communities and the system there shrugged off the murder of Tamir Rice.)
We need to change the Court. Oh, and Thomas has been The Worst on these issues. But Scalia and Alito suck all the time also, too.
scav
Blockquoted for mindset.
@magurakurin: Nah, not at all. Cecil was prettier and far more noble. But at least probably a natural part of a real ecosystem rather than a pseudo cartoon character with a keyboard and not much else of value.
Bargal20
The Blue Wall is an international thing. Twenty -nine years ago I was walking with my brother past two parked police cars here in Melbourne , Australia, when the cops stopped me. They were apparently investigating an abandoned stolen car, and asked me where I was going and if I’d ever been in trouble with the police before. Then they asked for my name and address. At that time I was under no legal obligation to provide identity to the police unless I was under arrest. I refused to provide my details because I’d heard enough accounts of innocent people getting stitched up by cops eager to close cases.
One cop didn’t take my refusal well, and punched me in the face and then slammed me into the hood of a police car. My brother, afraid for me, gave the police my details. The police then let us go.
I went straight to the local station house with a bleeding mouth to file a complaint and was told by the desk sergeant to “piss off” and then he warned me that if i complained any further he’d contact my parents to tell them I was on drugs. He mistakenly thought I was a minor (I looked young for eighteen). I’d never used illegal drugs up to that point of my life. I’d never had contact with the police up to that point, beyond a school field trip to the local station house in the fourth grade.
I contacted the internal affairs office at police headquarters and an official investigation occurred. The officer who came to my mother’s house to take my statement told me police were always under pressure and I should be more understanding. He asked me to withdraw my complaint. I refused.
The final internal affairs report stated that the three officers who’d witnessed my assault claimed to have seen nothing, and that no further action was warranted. For about two years after that the police in my neighborhood would stop me whenever they saw me and conduct “drug searches”.
Ryan
Wow. It defies words. What the hell is wrong with these people? Fvckstick, you aren’t going to lose in a police chase, but I guess a dead body is good enough? Be professionals!
Brachiator
I am not sure about the culture of permissiveness. Bad cops have been around for a long time. But I agree with your other points. It’s almost as though there is a handbook of lies that cops pick in order to clear a bad shooting or other misbehavior. And there seems to be an understanding that cops must always back up one another, that if you don’t support a fellow cop’s lie, then you are exhibiting disloyalty to the force, and to the brotherhood of cops.
@Hal
I get the feeling that this very subjective defense is used more often now that we have more examples of witnesses coming forward to dispute what happened, and more importantly, more videos showing what happened.
It’s almost comical. When a video surfaces showing a civilian, especially a nonwhite person, allegedly doing something wrong, everyone, especially the Internets will jump up and declare that “this is all you need to know. Guilty. Case closed.” But if the video shows a cop, doing something wrong, the immediate response is, “the video doesn’t tell the whole story. You don’t know what else was going on before or after the video.”
And if that fails, then the “feared for his life” gambit is used. And how could anyone dispute that? Don’t you support the police?
Yes, cops have a tough job. But innocent people cannot be sacrificed when cops make mistakes or worse, deliberately and maliciously go after people in anger.
trollhattan
@raven:
MIT, also, too.
HRA
I retired after working on a campus for 28 years. The campus police were issued guns and had training for usage after colleges became targets by armed assailants.
Campus police are allowed to pursue any car that committed an offense on campus or is a suspect and exited off of campus. My understanding was they had to inform the local police of the community about the pursuit ASAP.
I did not watch the video. I have yet to see a clear picture on what occurred except the there is one man dead and a campus policeman indicted for his death.
Roger Moore
@raven:
Not always. There’s a quote above mentioning that arming university police is only typical for public universities; private ones typically don’t arm theirs. That’s what I remember from my college days, and frankly I think we were all safer with the security force there unarmed. Those bozos would have shot their own feet off if they had been given guns.
different-church-lady
@mclaren: I find it admirable you have dedicated your life to making bad things worse.
Another Holocene Human
@WereBear: state schools have sworn cops, often state cops
private schools have rent a cops
I always had contempt for rent a cops but I’ve learned the state cops are worse
time to get rid of them
celticdragonchick
@Brachiator:
A prosecutor on MSNBC (African American female) during the Baltimore coverage noted that cops are using rote script now across the country in almost every shooting.
He reached for his waistband. I was afraid for my life.
That’s all you need. 11 words to cover every single police/citizen interaction.
raven
@WereBear: They are regular cops with the same training. A friend of mine worked at the university and was on the city council. He got downsized and, because of his retirement, took a job as a compass cop. He’s a really good dude and we talk about the training he undergoes all the time.
different-church-lady
@magurakurin:
And, I’m sure, when the end times come, it will be just McLaren and the cockroaches.
Lucky for McLaren we only skin people rhetorically here.
raven
@Roger Moore: I was thinking of public institutions which is why the two I mentioned are just that.
celticdragonchick
@raven: Not neccesarily the same training. The campus cops in question trained to state standards, but the city cops had different training and different requirements because of the 2001 consent decree placed on them by the Justice Dept.
Another Holocene Human
@Bargal20: That’s horrible. All of it.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@different-church-lady: I love you.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
It’s some private colleges too:
Kay
@celticdragonchick:
That’s true. They’re state officers at a public university.
Major Major Major Major
This ‘a guy’ fellow sure likes pie all of a sudden.
Roger Moore
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Always a good idea. Make sure to use plenty of all caps, while you’re at it.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Major Major Major Major: I really like pie. I wish the pie filter worked on my computer, but it doesn’t.
Or maybe it will now, since this is a newer Mac.
Off to try it out.
different-church-lady
Well, I’ve finally screwed up the courage to watch that vid, and all I can say is that… is… NUTS.
Where in the hell did a police officer get taught to just open the car door? I have NEVER seen such a thing, and I’ve ridden with cops.
Kay
@raven:
In Ohio at a university they would get state officer training which could be different from a municipal officer, but would meet state officer requirements.
raven
@Kay:Well I guess I was wrong huh?
Omnes Omnibus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: @Roger Moore: Also, hit him up on Twitter.
Another Holocene Human
@different-church-lady: I don’t think mclaren can really help being mclaren and, if anything, the quality of her posts has improved a lot lately. Frankly, I resent your campaign to shame her. She has an opinion, you have yours, and you’re not obligated to read anything she writes.
I’m autistic too. I’ve had people try to shame me on the internet too. It didn’t make me straighten up and fly right and suddenly communicate just the way that neurotypical people wanted me to. Learning to interact with the humans has been a long and arduous process and nasty attacks only made it more difficult because it added massive anxiety to the mix.
HRA
This from the site of the campus police where I once worked.
University Police Officers are required to have completed a minimum of 60 college credits in order to meet the position’s minimum requirements. Many have earned Bachelor and Master degrees. After attending the 21 week basic police academy training they also receive specialized training on numerous topics, including the following:
Accident Investigation
Advanced Investigation
Arson Investigation
Ident-A-Kit
Juvenile Officer
Civil Disturbance
Breath Test Operator
Instructor Development
Hazardous Materials
Cultural Diversity
Crime Prevention
Fire Safety
Bias Crime
Firearms
NYSP Traffic Institute
Community Policing
Standard First Aid and Personal Safety
Police Bicyclists
Defensive Tactics
Basic and Advanced Fingerprinting
ASP Baton
Substance Abuse Recognition
Mental Health Laws
Rape Awareness
Police Photography
Driving While Intoxicated Offenses
Dispute Resolution
Bomb Recognition
One of those campus police officers went on the become chief of police in the same community as the U.
Kay
@raven:
No, not really. It’s just the difference between city and state, in Ohio anyway. They’re more like state troopers than city cops.
Major Major Major Major
My undergrad (private) had its own police station. I don’t remember if they carried guns, since my only interactions were
1. I was walking around with a bottle of maker’s mark on my 21st birthday and walked by a cop. “Can I see some ID for that? Well happy birthday, you have good taste. I won’t ask how you got it… *laugh*””
2. Stoned, walking around listening to music. Squad car pulls up. “You’re not in any trouble, just wanted you to know there was a mountain lion sighting in the neighborhood.”
3. Had to call an ambulance when my boyfriend fainted, too busy crying to care.
For ubergrad I went to a public school and never saw a cop.
raven
@Kay: In what sense? The UGA cops patrol the main campus and the medical school which is in my neighborhood. They issue tickets on the city streets between the campuses.
Another Holocene Human
@Kay: University of Florida campus cops are sworn state troopers.
Which doesn’t stop them from evincing a level of professionalism lower than small town Florida speed trap cops.
And it doesn’t help that they hire reject cops, like the guy who shot disabled, mentally ill foreign national grad student Kofi Adu-Brempong in the face on a WELFARE call.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Another Holocene Human: mclaren is autistic? This is the first I’ve heard of it.
On the other hand, yes, he/she is entitled to his/her opinion, but aren’t we just as entitled to disagree with them?
Edited to add, she amended her post and added some things I do not love, after I’d already posted to her.
raven
@Another Holocene Human: Yep, that proves it. All cops are murderers.
Major Major Major Major
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): Well of course. I try to just be nice, myself.
Omnes Omnibus
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): IMO mclaren is just an asshole.
raven
@Another Holocene Human: She’s a fucking idiot.
Ol'Froth
@mclaren: Fuck you very much. I’ve been protecting and serving for more than two decades. And I want shitbag cops prosecuted just as much as you do. But just as you don’t want to be painted by a broad brush, neither do I.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Major Major Major Major: I’m not as nice as you.
JPL
@Ol’Froth: this
Ol'Froth
@Ajabu: Well, no, it wasn’t a bogus stop, and no, he wasn’t out of his jurisdiction (campus police often have full municiple police powers and can in fact, enforce violations off campus). However, I see no justification for the use of deadly force just because someone tries to drive off for a summary traffic offense, and I don’t buy the “he tried to run me over” defense.
Another Holocene Human
@raven: It’s probably like UF and Gainesville where they have a “mutual aid” agreement which allows them to patrol frat/sorority areas and fratty bars but also lets them pull over highly suspicious bu-bu-bu-black people “minding their own business” and “driving from point A to point B”. Gotta put a stop to that.
Look, I’m not saying there’s no place for public safety. The campus is enmeshed in town and you get the masturbators and the stalkers and the shitheads (big freak out a couple of days ago when somebody fired a gun in the air in front of a residence hall). You’ve got students who get drunk and get in brawls … on the bus … and half of them are community college students or townies. I see why they feel like they have to protect the kids, but, you know, which kids. Eh, I don’t know what I’m saying but we can do better than this. One of the first things I learned when I moved to Gainesville was how much UPD sucks. Nobody respects them. A big part of their job every day is traffic operations and they can’t even do that right.
raven
@Ol’Froth: Good on you! I know plenty of good cops.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Omnes Omnibus: That was my take, autism or no.
I know a number of cops and most are decent people and good at their jobs, and I do not believe that all cops are terrible people nor are they murderers.
None of the bullies from my HS became a cop, probably not bright enough. The one cop I know of from my graduating class quit after about 5 years to start a private security company; he was not a bully in HS, but he also wasn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.
raven
@Another Holocene Human: My buddy switches day and night shifts every 6y months. He says we don’t even want to know what it’s like late at night just a few blocks from my house.
Another Holocene Human
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): Asperger’s, I think.
But I think she has something else going on psych wise that she won’t admit to on this board. Anxiety disorder at the very, very least.
Ranting that “all cops are evil” shows signs of cognitive distortion that’s associated with anxiety and depression disorders. Black and white thinking, catastrophizing, excluded middle. I know because I had to work on that stuff myself.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
That’ll never work
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Another Holocene Human: Yeah, I saw your rant about engineers and had a hard time not calling you out on that. I’ve heard that bullshit for years.
I’m married to one, and I know that most of the stuff you were blaming on engineers should have been blamed on contractors.
I’ll shut up now.
dogwood
This day began with the PTB in Cinncinnati preparing for protests and unrest, so what’s going on in Cincy? Haven’t heard anything about that.
raven
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): Casey Jones you better watch your speed. . .
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: LOL.
Another Holocene Human
@raven: Flipping days and nights, which is something demanded of cops and some other kinds of workers, has horrible negative effects on the body. It also affects the brain in detrimental ways. It’s been proven to raise the risk of cancer. If it’s 6 months actually your buddy has it good because some departments have mandatory rotation every 6 weeks. But at any timescale it’s brutal.
Cops do a job that sucks and that most of us would never want. No surprise some departments don’t work too hard to weed out the people drawn to the badge for the wrong reasons, and there are some very wrong reasons.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@raven: The wreck wasn’t Casey’s fault, and he died a hero.
Also, I’m not high on cocaine.
Another Holocene Human
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): I went to engineering school. Don’t snow me. They blame contractors first–always!! I, maybe not respectfully, disagree. The profession bears some responsibility.
There are plenty of great engineers. Two of my best friends are engineers. I also met, well, the run of the mill at state school. Not impressed.
Major Major Major Major
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): The idea behind that rant ended up as a joke in my story.
Omnes Omnibus
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): Fax Cole your credenza. It is the only way to be sure.
Kay
@raven:
The trustees are authorized by state statute to appoint an employee a state police officer. Ohio makes a distinction. The private college police are the equivalent of county police officers- like a sheriff’s deputy. That’s determined in the statute that authorizes them.
I don’t know but I think they did it that way because the university would be state property-separate from the city.
Another Holocene Human
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): I’m glad you posted that before I did so I wouldn’t feel like such an utter geek.
Casey got “railroaded” in the most indelible way possible, in the days before FRA safety regulations.
raven
@Another Holocene Human: I worked the night shift at the Post Office as a “mail handler”. For the first 6 months they could work you 12 hours for 7 days and then give you a day off. The bars in Champaign opened at 6am so we’d just go and drink ourselves into oblivion, get up and do it again. One of the best things that ever happened to me was they found a wrong answer about a little special court martial and fired me! Thank the FSM, I would have gone off the deep end for sure.
different-church-lady
@Another Holocene Human: I just want to state for the record that I am now staring at a very cutting remark have just typed and doing some very serious dithering over whether I should pull the trigger.
I not sure if there’s a kinder way for me to express my reaction, but I’m gonna give it some more time to figure it out.
raven
@Kay: Campus cops at Illinois and Georgia are state.
Ol'Froth
I’ve been thinking long and hard about this, and we’ve had issues on my own department, but in my experience, it has little to do with “thin blue lineism” Police, by practice, usually operate alone. Two officer cars are a rarity. Usually, when backup arrives, the indient is a full blown pig pile or over, and officers are willing to give the first officer on the scene the benefit of the doubt. In general, we tend to deal with the worst elements of society when called to the scene of a crime, but that is a totally different situation than the “routine traffic stop.” However, no traffic stop is ever routine. The guy you pull over for an inspection sticker violation might have just killed his or her spouse. In any case, when making first contact, a good officer should get a “feel” for the driver. Watching this video, I’d suspect that DuBois might have been under suspension, or might have had a warrant, but is that a reason for deploying deadly force? Hell no! The worst he does is refuse to get out of the car and attempt to drive off. That’s not a capital offense. But back to the larger point of good officers covering for bad ones. I don’t think its a concious action. For any number of reasons, coworkers are reluctant to “rat out” their fellows regardless of industry, the dirty laundry only comes out once the bad guy steps on a rake. I’ve seen this when I worked in broadcasting, I’ve seen it when I worked in retail, and I’ve seen it, yes, in policing. The major difference is that only in policing does the employee have the state sanctioned right to kill.
Kay
@raven:
A police officer told me there are deer in my front yard in the middle of the night. I had no idea. I said “how many?” I love the idea there’s a big herd out there and we’re all sleeping right thru it. It’s right in the middle of town. They head back out before sunrise? What else goes on I don’t know?
raven
@Kay: Big rats.
Ohio Mom
@Another Holocene Human: As a mom to a teen on the spectrum, just want to say I appreciate this comment. It’s always encouraging to me to see and hear autistic people advocate for themselves. Gives me hope about what my son may be capable of one day. I’ll be following your comments with a new interest from here on out.
Kay
@Ol’Froth:
Do you think it would be better with two officers per police car? I noticed this officer seemed very jumpy right from the outset, but maybe that’s because I knew what was coming. He seemed really alarmed when the driver moved to get the license plate.
Brachiator
@celticdragonchick:
A reporter discussing an officer involved shooting in Los Angeles notes, “in California, the law gives great latitude to police officers who say that they felt that their lives were in danger and fired in self-defense.” It then doesn’t much matter whether the shooting was out of policy or the officer made any error.
raven
@Ol’Froth: George the Cops walked a beat in campus town in Champaign. There was a guy shoplifting in a grocery store and he broke George’s jaw with a frozen chicken.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Another Holocene Human: That’s not the point. You did exactly what McLaren did: tarred them all with the same brush.
I don’t know why you’d say I was snowing you. I went to an engineering school and took some engineering courses (for breadth), and it’s just like what I said about cops: some are good, some not so much.
My husband and most of the engineers he worked with were very good at their jobs, and the stuff I noticed you bitching about was typical of what a few bad contractors pull. Trying to pour cement for a bridge when the batch was already too hot? Paving a road with asphalt while it’s raining? Drilling a well without supporting the walls correctly, and after the walls collapsed halfway down demanded full payment? I could go on, but I won’t. There were good contractors too, but the bad ones always tried to blame the engineers for their own errors and misbehavior.
I could go on.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Major Major Major Major: Haha! I will have to start reading your story.
Another Holocene Human
@raven: 7 12’s is just brutal. It’s actually over the line to illegal for a driver, so I can’t say I ever racked that one up myself although I remember my first year working so many hours that the muscles around my eyes were sore.
Major Major Major Major
@raven: Rodents of unusual size? Why, I don’t believe in theeEEAGH!!!
@Ohio Mom: We’re out there. There was a group social skills class my parents sent to that helped a lot, and then I trained at a crisis call center so you know all the rules to survive at that point. I also recommend some sort of martial art, or dancing or gymnastics, it can help train the clumsiness out. And the first one has other uses ;)
For us, life can be like an extra set of rules most people don’t have to learn is there; but they’re learnable. Talking, movement, discretion, all can be learned.
raven
@Another Holocene Human: It was awful, we were the return site for the Columbia Record Club and bags of albums were almost as heavy as the National Geographics!
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: California is a stand your ground state; I forget the exact language, but “reasonable fear” or something like that applies to citizens too. They made us look it up the other day so we don’t Krav somebody to death at the wrong time lol
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Another Holocene Human: The Casey Jones story pisses me off royally, still. There used to be certain bars where if you sang the wrong version, the one where he had another wife at the end of the line, you’d end up in a fight and you’d lose, well into the 1970s.
Major Major Major Major
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): Linked in my nym :)
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Another Holocene Human: You, like me, went to engineering school, but you, like me are not an engineer.
We should both just shut up.
Lavocat
This is why I call cops “criminals with badges, janitors with guns”.
They literally have a license to kill – and the wherewithal to make their killings simply disappear or otherwise be completely rationalized.
The only reason why this particular cop was actually caught is only because he was too fucking stupid to properly cover up his crime.
Now … think about all the cops in America who are NOT this fucking stupid.
Mind-boggling, huh?
Ol'Froth
@Kay: I think it would be better. However, for economic reasons, that just doesn’t happen. Two officers in two cars can cover more ground than two officers in one car, even though backup in most urban/suburban areas is just minutes, if not seconds away (look how quickly backup is on scene in the DuBois video) Having another person on scene does two things, it lessens the anxiety of the contact officer, and it intimidates the subject if the subject is a bad guy. I’ve found that most minor violators (traffic violations) don’t object to the presence of a second officer. That’s my antedoctal experience, I’m not really aware of any studies that support it. In any case, from a dollars and cents perspective, which is what the politicians who determine police budgets are driven by, one person cars are more economical than two person cars.
different-church-lady
@Another Holocene Human: Still fumbling over this because I do not feel good about discussing someone’s theoretical conditions from the removal of the internet. You appear to have inside information. This is the first I’ve heard of it. I’m not going to share my theories about it because that would be stupid and Frist-ian.
I will say there is no “campaign” on my part to shame mclaren. I don’t log on to BJ thinking, ‘Oh, I hope I get to pound on mclaren tonight!’ I take her comments as they appear on the screen, because I have no insights into her circumstances — the same as anyone else.
ETA: and there most certainly is NO campaign to shame her about autism.
Another Holocene Human
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): You’re right, I am generalizing. But there’s something about the profession as a whole that, first of all, discourages anything but doing things the same way they’ve always been done because otherwise “they’ll sue you, and when they sue you, you want to show it was standard practice”.
Lots of the money is and has always been private sector, even as government has been the patron, so there’s only been anemic, and mostly recent interest in actually investigating efficacy, safety, and so on. Even today, a lot of received wisdom in road engineering is superstition. (Or based on that one study they did that one time. I came from sciences and that absolutely floored me.)
They know that parabolic curves for ramps are safer, and they’re laid out that way in Europe. But they won’t even try to put them in in the US and the claim is that the US blue collar worker is too stupid and mulish to lay out a parabolic curve. Now, teenagers with boards in wheat fields manage to lay them out, but somehow a professional construction foreman could never work it out. I find that attitude infuriating.
I see your point that if a road washes out most people will never know that it was a construction error. That wasn’t really the issue on my mind. I guess I would assume it was the crews and construction management if anything because they were there on the ground. If people are running around blaming engineers for those sorts of things that’s kind of dumb.
(It’s like that bridge that went down because the oversize load pilot completely fucked up. As a professional driver I blamed the drivers: “you had one job” and all that. I know people online were blaming engineers but engineers can’t foresee every permutation of human stupidity. I guess I just tuned out the derp because derp.)
Ol'Froth
@Lavocat: Body cams. All departments should be using them. Good cops don’t object, and if you do object, you shouldn’t be a cop. My department still doesn’t have dashboard cams, let alone body cams. Drives me nuts.
Another Holocene Human
@different-church-lady: I thought that mclaren disclosed that long ago, when her late night dead thread posts read like someone in dire need of psychiatric intervention.
different-church-lady
@Another Holocene Human: Well, sorry if I’m not clued in to that.
If what you’re trying to get across to me is “Hey, back off a bit, there’s a thing,” then I can roll with that.
Which also means I’m glad I deleted a lot of angry shit in the last ten minutes.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Ohio Mom: My cousin’s son probably has Aspergers. God knows, they’ve been trying to diagnose him since he was a little boy and were wrong, wrong, and wrong again.
He’s 45. They only figured it out when he was 43.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Kay: At the particular university in question, there is a long history of employing officers who would (or did) wash out in another department. It was unkind for a certain prosecutor to refer to them as “special ed with guns and badges.” But that prosecutor had the experience of trying a couple of absolute metric tons of bullshit cases filed by that department, one of which turned out to be a finding of guilt, fortunately reversed on appeal. Oddly, the state’s appellate brief took no position on the issues presented.
These university officers seem to enjoy traffic stops off campus. This is a tragic situation, and I applaud the indictment.
Another Holocene Human
@different-church-lady:
I didn’t say there was. Here’s the thing. Neurotypical people often get fed up with the ways that autistic people communicate. They also get fed up with some of their other quirks. Autism isn’t just thinking about the world differently. It also comes with attentional and sensory problems. Some autistic people have a lot of difficulties with face to face communication (or even with talking period, both understanding what other people are saying, and speaking) so they use the internet to communicate with others. So it’s not uncommon to interact with people on the spectrum online whose social skills have not caught up with their ability to type and navigate the internet.
It can be really, really hard to learn how to “tune in” to other people’s cues, especially if you were doing all the wrong things in meatspace. I had an auditory processing defect, so I learned to look at people’s mouths when they were talking. I also found eye contact too intense. Because I never looked at people’s eyes I had more trouble identifying people on sight (I have identified people by their mouths before, though) and I also missed TONS of information from every conversation. It took years from the time I was first told about this issue to be able to retrain myself to look at eyes and at faces as a whole instead of just the mouth. So if I was missing all that info from face to face conversation, how much more difficult would that be on the internet, right? I was very ranty and disruptive online.
I guess what I mean is I have some empathy for what mclaren is going through and I tend to dismiss the high dudgeon statements she makes because they’re not right mind kind of thinking. Screaming at her and calling her a jerk is not helping her in any way. #justmyopinion
Kay
@Ol’Froth:
I’m sympathetic to the anxiety when approaching a car, so I thought 2 officers might be better. I imagine it can go very bad very fast. It seemed this cop was weirdly argumentative about the license. That’s where it started to escalate with 4 times the same question. I’m not clear what the point of that was- it seemed like he was getting nervous and starting to lose control with the excessive back and forth on that one question- like he didn’t know what to do next so kept asking.
Another Holocene Human
@different-church-lady: :)
Dupe70
@A guy: Right wing fascists always demanding a “perfect victim” otherwise cops totally justified in extra-judicial killing.
Another Holocene Human
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): Maybe so. :)
Kathleen
@lamh36: I loved that. She ought to be a reporter.
Kay
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Thanks. That explains a lot. The prosecutors comments were interesting, to say the least. I don;t believe I have ever heard one talk like that before in public!
Another Holocene Human
@Dupe70: I don’t think they’ve ever found that perfect victim, though.
Even Jesus looked kind of suspicious, I mean he hung around with criminals, went around saying it was okay not to keep the Sabbath day holy, and sassed his mother.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Holocene Human: Not to mention the petty vandalism and property crimes in the temple.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Mike J: HIs lawyer is a great guy and a skilled trial lawyer, but I’ll be very surprised if he can win this one.
@Kay: I was pretty shocked as that’s totally not.his.style. Do you recall his stint as state treasurer?
Another Holocene Human
@Major Major Major Major: Btw, wanted to say earlier that I am glad that you are open about being poly on here. A lot of misunderstanding and stigma out there towards poly lifestyles and poly people.
Lavocat
@Ol’Froth: The problem is that there are no systematic protocols for the retention & release of the body cam footage. This will be the next obstacle to overcome.
Kathleen
@Ol’Froth: The prosecutor referred to it as a chicken crap stop. And UC police can and do go beyond UC. However, Deters wants to abolish UC cops and create special UC district manned by Cincinnati police.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Another Holocene Human: In California the parabolic curve is used on sag curves and crest curves. The Civil Engineer (better than an uncivil engineer) sitting beside me, eating supper, confirmed this. He is now retired. He designed a hell of a lot of stuff in California; when you drive down certain freeways you are driving on his work.
I don’t know what bridge you’re talking about, or where.
Kathleen
@dogwood: BLM held protest at 6:30 at the courthouse. Haven’t heard anything more. I myself never thought there would be any trouble.
dexwood
@dopey-o: Therefore, they are no longer good cops. Enablers. Silent consent.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Holocene Human: Thanks! It’s really not that complicated. Then again, one of those ask two poly people, get three answers situations.
EBT
A good officer never once covered for a bad one. Once you lie to save someone else’s skin you are as culpable as the original guilty bastard.
Kathleen
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): A local reporter who has worked here 27 years said she has never seen Deters that mad. I, too, was quite surprised at his reaction, though the reporter said he could be very emotional.
pseudonymous in nc
Broad institutional thing: kampus kops need to go the fuck away. Small town kops need to go the fuck away. Kounty Kops probably ought to go the fuck away. I think the Canadian approach — a national police force, with national standards, and concessions granted to large urban areas if they show cause to have them — has greater merit.
Ohio Mom
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): To be fair, the dx of Asperger’s only dates back to the early 1990s, which was after an English autism researcher named Uta Frith discovered and translated Hans Asperger’s work. So the people trying to evaluate your cousin’s son simply did not have the vocabulary to define what they were seeing. If it makes your family feel any better, the same thing happened to lots of other people, and he is not the only identified late in life.
I hope he finds the support he needs and deserves. It’s the best time it ever was for autistic people.
Kathleen
Here’s a pretty good summary of Deters/City Officials/DuBose Family press conferences:
http://citybeat.com/cincinnati/blog-6599-grand_jury_indicts_officer_in_death_of_samuel_dubose.html
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Kathleen: I’ve seen him be plenty pissed and express that away from cameras, but I’ve never seen him quite that angry. And certainly not so publicly.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Holocene Human: It makes me really mad about the “Clinton Sex Life” “scandal” “thing”, too. You don’t know what kind of arrangement they have and if they don’t want to tell you, too bad. Did people get this huffy about Kennedy? He wasn’t even being subtle.
Kay
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
The comments got all kinds of interest here today from lawyers and such but no one was criticizing him- he sounded frustrated and furious and rightly so.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Ohio Mom: Aspergers is no longer considered to be part of the autism spectrum. The problem with Ian wasn’t just that there was no diagnosis but that there were so many wrong ones. When he was little they thought it was ADD (hyperactivity, back then). We stayed with the family when our sons were about the same age, about 6, and we saw what hell the family’s life must have been, but my cousin seemed to take it all in stride. My son was a little afraid of him because he was so violent when he played, and because he was so much bigger even though they were about a year apart.
That night he was up all night, screaming and slamming doors, running up and down the hallway; they didn’t respond but we heard it because there was no door we could shut. The family doctor had just told my cousin that his problem should be handled “naturally” and told her to stop the ritalin, but without giving her any other advice as to what this “natural” treatment should consist of. For a while they thought he was just sensitive to food dyes, then it was blamed on some other allergy, but no one knew what it was.
He was involved in a number of kid activities growing up, like Boy Scouts and school clubs, and had as close to a normal childhood as possible. When personal computers appeared, he found his true love. Until the financial crash he was employed by a tech firm, and his bosses adored him because he loved his work and was good at it. I can’t explain what he was doing, it was way over my head.
celticdragonchick
@Ol’Froth:
When I still worked in commercial aviation, we absolutely reported on coworkers if something was fucked up. There are several hundred people betting their lives on your work on a B777 and there is no goddamned room for hiding bad work.
One of my coworkers, fresh out of the Marine Corps, came to me one night when we were doing the initial inspection on a United Airlines B767 coming in for a heavy C check (about a month worth of tear down and repairs).
One of the younger kids working had fucked up a longeron in the aft cargo compartment and was trying to pass it off as damage he discovered. My coworker was too pissed off at him to talk sense to the kid, so he asked me to go and counsel the kid on workplace honesty around airplanes. If I couldn’t get him to ‘fess up, he was going to be reported and fired with a lifetime ban from aviation attached to his SSN.
I got the kid to go to the evening lead and admit he damaged structure on opening up the floorboards, the lead sighed and wrote up a work order on the damage and that was that. No punishment, no chewing out. We demand honesty. Nothing else will fly.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Kay: As I mentioned there’s a long history of UC policing being less than optimal. Mostly for misdemeanors, but occasionally felonies. A fatal interaction is a new low for the agency, and given 2001, it had all kinds of potential to be volatile. Then the tape made it quite obvious what would happen.
Ol'Froth
@Kay: I got the same vibe. Why get into an argument? Just run the info.
blueskies
@Ol’Froth: You describe what might be understandable in the heat of the moment, where the arriving back-up gives the first responder the benefit of the doubt.
But that’s not what happened here. At all.
“Officer Kidd was on scene with OIT Lindenschmidt. Officer Kidd told me that he witnessed the Honda Accord drag Officer Tensing, and that he witnessed Officer Tensing fire a single shot. It is unclear how much of this incident OIT Lindenschmidt witnessed.”
Officer Kidd says he witnessed….
Never happened. Big ol’ lie. A criminal lie. And that was after plenty of time to think about what he’d say for the report. Not in the heat of the moment, but rather, a calculated, considered L-I-E.
It’s a twofer.
Ol'Froth
@Lavocat: Part of that is that body cam footage is evidence, and you do not want to taint a jury pool by releasing that evidence too soon. You could blow a valid case doing that. I think the Cincy autorities were right in withholding the video until the indictment came down.
celticdragonchick
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
The prosecutor who went after the cops that beat the homless guy in Fullerton California to death had an airtight case, and he gave it 100%. Everything was on video, crystal clear and they even had the audio bits of the lead cop menacing the victim. Hell, the DA even said the homeless guy had the Constitutional Right to fight the cops in self defense at that point since it was obvious he was going to be beaten for nothing at all.
He still lost. White juries like cops, and especially as long as the accused cops are hurting one of them. You can go back and look at police brutality against organized labor, women’s vote advocates etc and the pattern remains consistent. Hurting other people is fine. Police attacks on striking women in NYC in the teens didn’t stop until millionaire wives started joining the picket lines incognito (and made sure the police knew that upper society women would be out there) to stop the beatings.
Ol'Froth
@celticdragonchick: ANd how many times did that not happen? There’s legions of incidents never reported that resulted in disater. http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-asias-flights-potentially-dangerous-mistakes-go-unreported-1436836841
Ol'Froth
@blueskies: I am NOT at all trying to excuse the reports of the responding officers in the case at hand.
sm*t cl*de
You may be confusing Uta Frith with Lorna Wing, who coined the term “Aspergers syndrome” in 1981:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7208735
Her husband (John Wing) had remembered Asperger’s 1946 paper, and translated into English, about 1978
(though IIRC you are right about Uta’s 1991 translation being the first to be published).
celticdragonchick
@Ol’Froth:
Nine times out of ten, an airplane acident in the US results from pilot error. That is because maintenance is really, really good.
When you have an exception (the commuter crash at Charlotte, the Alaska Air crash off of a California coast or the DC-10 engine loss incidents in the 70’s) you can look at ignorance and not following procedures (the Charlotte crash), one person working alone and lack of inspection (the Alaska Air incident where the DC-9 vertical stab jackscrew was not being lubed properly and it jammed) or an engineering problem coupled with ignorance (all the DC-10 crashes…engineering issues and lack of standardized protocols for engine removal damaged the mounting bolts. Similar problems with the cargo doors as well which led to catastrophic depressurization incidents)
Aviation works off of multiple systems of redundancy and inspection to stop these things in their tracks…and honesty is a must.
If you get caught pencil whipping your work…not only will you be banned from ever touching an airplane for the rest of your life, you may be on the carpet in front of the FAA and the NTSB facing criminal charges. Every form on that airplane is a sworn federal legal document. Every. Single. One.
Falsifying them is a federal crime.
Why can’t we do that to the police? Why do cops get a pass on “testilying”?
celticdragonchick
For a prime example of police officers caught testilying on the stand with no consequence to their jobs…watch the Academy Award winning documentary Murder on a Sunday Morning…which was filmed covering a trial in Jacksonville about 15 years ago or so.
Cops beat the kid and pinned a false murder charge on him and were caught red handed lying on the stand in court.
Who got fired?
The public defender who uncovered what they did and won the case for the kid.
pseudonymous in nc
@celticdragonchick:
Because — and this is the deep institutional truth — the tolerated standards for cops in the US range from ‘acceptable’ to ‘scraped right through the barrel’.
America mostly gets the cops that white Americans want. They don’t have to be good cops.
mai naem mobile
My sister was taking my moms car in for repairs and she had taken her work papers out of her car to work on at the dealer in case it was a short visit. She doesn’t use a purse. She leaves her stuff in her car. Anyhow, she gets pulled over for not staying in her lane(the car was pulling to the right and that was the reason the car was going in and she says she didn’t get out of the lane but did get to the edge at a big curve.) The cop asks for her license and she looks for it,can’t find it and the cop asks her if she’s lying, is it suspended?etc.etc. The guy goes back to his car , verifies her info, meanwhile she’s found her license. He comes back,she.hands him the license,hes a little po’d because he had to rewrite the ticket and take off the lack of license ticket. The cop was snarky to her about the car pulling to the right(do you want to have the car towed to the dealer right now?) Anyhow,my sister could have been Dubose. Why was this cop giving Dubose.such a hard time? WTF? I’ve had my fair share of tickets over the years and after watching these fatal traffic stops, I’m kind of scared of getting stopped.
celticdragonchick
@pseudonymous in nc:
My dad was a corrections officer in California at a minimum security facility (drunk drivers, check fraud types etc). I heard the stories.
2 of the guys he worked with were sadists (his words). They were geniuses at finding ways to hurt inmates and justify the use of force on the books. None of the other officers had anything remotely approachng their use of force totals…but nothing could be done about them. They kept hurting people for fun, and it was tolerated.
Then there was local Banning California PD who sometimes got tasked with inmate delivery. If it was one guy they were bringing in for inprocessing, they would beat the living shit out of him as a hazing ritual and dump the inmate on the correctional staff as a prank…who now had to deal with an extremely pissed off, loud and possibly injured inmate.
The Banning officers thought that was funny. The correctional officers generally were not amused…but again, nothing was done about it. The books were always “balanced” to justify the force and as long as it was inmates getting the shit kicked out of them, who cares?
My dad was angry and bitter when he left corrections. I wish to God he had never taken that fucking job.
mclaren
That officer wasn’t lying, he was only Kidding.
mclaren
@celticdragonchick:
Puh-lease.
Ask yourself: who the fuck would want to do a dirty crappy bureaucratically nightmarish job like policing, where you have to routinely deal with the world’s worst people and then fill out endless forms in triplicate to explain every microscopic detail of what you did?
The only people who would want to go through that kind of wringer are the powertrippers and sadists and control freaks who know that the reward is, at the end of the day…they will be able to beat someone into hamburger or pistol-whip him blind or sodomize the guy with a bathroom plunger handle. And get away with it.
Police work attracts bullies the way manure attracts flies.
It’s a plain and simple fact. And if you think things are bad now, hoo boy! You should have seen what policing was like 100 years ago. Every officer in the precinct was on the take, from the captain to the lieutenants on down to the beat cops. If there was a burglarly, you could count on the tenement getting cleaned out by the time the last “investigating officer” had gone through the place. And if a hooker got picked up for soliciting, she went through every officer on duty in the station before she got booked.
I won’t even mention the rubber hoses and the special room under the station latrine where recalcitrant suspects got manacled in order to enjoy the dubious benefits of repeated golden showers until they confessed…
mclaren
@Another Holocene Human:
How charmingly gracious of you.
I even took time out from my nightly electroshock therapy sessions to thank you. Now my attendants have to strap me onto the gurney again and put the hockey mask back on my face and wheel me away…
Brachiator
@Major Major Major Major:
Really? I’m not aware of any civilian vs civilian incident similar to what has happened in stand your ground states, or anyone trying to use the principle as a defense.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: And I was starting to think you had no sense of humor.
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2013/07/22/5-things-to-know-about-stand-your-ground-in-california
SWMBO
@celticdragonchick: My brother is a CO in a maximum security prison. They hold the death row inmates for the state. There are between 80-100 prisoners for each CO. If an inmate gets sick they have to transport them to a hospital that will take them (about 1 1/2 hours away). They have to wait for state troopers to take over and guard the prisoner while they are in hospital. He says the troopers routinely take their sweet time showing up. If they are at the end of their shift when they transport the prisoner, they may have to wait up to (another) 8 hours to be relieved. The cops look down on them because they feel the COs are lower in the food chain. My brother feels like the cops think they’re special because they caught the bad guys but he feels like they keep them away from society so the rest of us are safe. He doesn’t hate cops, just doesn’t like their arrogant attitude at times.
chris9059
@A guy: Just watch the video and you’ll see exactty what the cop saw in real time, and there is nothing there to justify this shooting.
AxelFoley
@A guy: Bitch, fuck you to hell.
Why is this asshole allowed to post here, Cole?
AxelFoley
@Brachiator:
This.
@celticdragonchick:
And this.
mclaren
@Brachiator:
I don’t believe that California is a “stand your ground” state to the extent that Florida is. I lived in California for 27 years, and they’re pretty unforgiving of property owners who wield guns and blow people away. Way too much of that goes on in CA and I’d be very surprised if CA prosecutors were as louche in turning a blind eye toward that sort of thing as the prosecutors in TX or FL are.
mclaren
@AxelFoley:
Now, now. Temper.
All sorts of assholes are allowed to post here in the theory that assholes will reveal who they are and get showered with the acid contempt they so richly deserve.
It works, too.
AxelFoley
Again…
@celticdragonchick:
This.
@pseudonymous in nc:
And this.
NorthLeft12
@celticdragonchick: I work in a chemical plant, and it is frustrating how difficult it is to get information out of people in an incident where the cause was a human error.
I had a discussion with a couple of operators [I am a Chemical Engineer] about the tendency to cover up or obfuscate, and their response was “Well, you don’t want to see the guy get fired, right?” My response was that they had a very strong Union, and the company management never fired [or attempted to] anyone for operating errors unless they were malicious and repeated. The worst I have ever seen happen is the particular guy would get spoken to and retrained on that particular task.
But they were adamant that they would not “rat” the guy out.
Knitty Gal
I agree that not all cops are bad, but we seem to be entering the territory of “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” quote to apply to all the silent cops.
blueskies
@celticdragonchick:
Nine-times-out-of-ten “pilot error” is tossed in as potential causative factor, especially when investigators can’t figure out what happened. Blaming the dead guy never got an NTSB investigator fired. Heck, I was tangentially involved in an investigation where the pilot was blamed for running out of fuel because the NTSB guy didn’t bother to check the OTHER tank, which was full. Even though it was eventually determined that the design of the fuel tank selection system was faulty and would fail 100% in particular scenarios, including the accident at hand, “pilot error” as one causative factor was never removed from the final report.
That said, I agree with your larger point: Aircraft maintenance is certainly a field where screw-ups are simply not abided. As a long-time pilot (and passenger), THANK YOU!
guest
Before you all start piling on the A guy troll, how about somebody address the facts.
In some states it is OK to drive without the front license plate, in others it is certainly not. So there may or may not have been a perfectly good reason to pull this guy over.
Then there is the question of jurisdiction and whether it was proper for this cop to pull this guy over where he did (if he started following him inside his jurisdiction, was it OK to pull him over when they went outside of the university).
Other than those questions, this looks like a very professional, courteous cop right up until the moment he blows someone’s face off for trying to drive off when the cop was trying to get him out of the vehicle.
Obviously he overreacted, but he doesn’t seem like a bad guy, like some of these other abusive cops we see. Just way unfit to be a cop. And obviously he saw he was in a huge mess that he made for himself and wanted to cover it up, that is sort of natural too, even when it wasn’t that intentional.
That’s when the other cops should have tried to walk him back and be more truthful about how it went down. Maybe if they had, their buddy wouldn’t be in nearly as much trouble as he is in now. Like, just the voluntary manslaughter charge instead of the murder charge added on to it.
Paul in KY
@different-church-lady: That’s her honest opinion on cops. I don’t agree with the absolutism of it, but I can see where you can get that opinion.
Paul in KY
@Major Major Major Major: UK had armed cops back in late 70s.
Paul in KY
@Ol’Froth: Stopping someone because they do not have a front license plate (in a state that technically requires one) is a bogus stop, IMO. He should have been on the campus, looking for thieves.
celticdragonchick
@blueskies:
You are certainly welcome. I took my job and my responsibility seriously, and I was proud of the work we did.
Michael Demmons
@A guy: Are you even TRYING to be serious????
So now, when a cop SPECIFICALLY ASKS you to get something, and you attempt to COMPLY, this is a good reason to SHOOT??
Fucking stupid comment.
bupalos
What the cop did is definitely way outside the rule of law and has to be punished hard. Nonetheless, I feel pretty bad for him. No where near as bad as for the driver, but I don’t think he was out to murder anybody, and doubt he’s any more of a racist or bully than the next guy (which is not at all to say he’s not a racist and bully.) I think he’s a stupid kid who didn’t take seriously or understand the job he was in generally or the situation particularly, the he was steeped in a culture that devalues the poor and minorities, and made an insane mistake in the heat of the moment.
From the point of view of the system, it’s great that he’s getting called out and brought to justice here. But I kind of think he and others like him are more symptoms than causes, and I’m distrustful of the over the top public reaction to this kid personally. It’s starts to feel like scapegoating, and a kind of around-the-bend way of the system denying that this is much closer to the norm than the system is comfortable admitting. The reality is the cop culture is steeped in the notion that poor minorities are, if not disposable, barely on the radar of human value. They are like animals, say pitt-bulls. They “can be o.k.” and ideally should be petted and treated nicely. But their society is nothing like your civilized society, you need to be ready for them to go off at any time, and the value of their entire lives just isn’t considered on the same scale as the marginal theoretical safety of the officer. So when in ANY doubt, fire away, and fix it later if necessary.
It’s not a “bad cop” problem. It’s a culture problem, and one that permeates all of society, not just police departments.
Bardi
@celticdragonchick:
“He reached for his waistband. I was afraid for my life.
That’s all you need. 11 words to cover every single police/citizen interaction.”
Yep, just as the driver to take off his seatbelt definitely leads to “He reached for his waistband. I was afraid for my life.” Nice set up. For the cop.
Procopius
@japa21: I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court basically has ruled that a cop doesn’t need any justification to order you out of your car so he can “check you for weapons.” Mimms vs. Pennsylvania or something like that. Over the last few days I’ve seen brief statements from “experts” and lawyers that this is not true, but I would say that if a cop tells you to get out of your car it would be a good idea to do so instead of arguing over whether or not he has a right to do so. This case is so bad even the prosecutor, who would normally be fighting to protect the cop, says he’s never seen such an obvious case of murder, but if we didn’t have the video …
Cluttered Mind
Does anyone have any proof that A Guy is not just DougJ trolling the community again? He’s pranked us good before.
Cluttered Mind
@Paul in KY: This. I don’t actually understand the purpose of stopping him. He was observed driving without a front license plate, and that’s a violation of the law. Okay, so call it in and issue the guy a fine. It IS possible to mail someone a ticket for minor stuff like that. But then, we’ve had a term for this for decades, “Driving while black”, stopping black drivers for things that get a white person at best a bench warrant or a mailed ticket and escalating the hell out of the situation. I’ve tried to explain this to my friends who don’t quite understand the attitudes that black people display in these videos. No they aren’t usually being particularly respectful to the police. Hypothetical question, white people: How respectful would you be of the police if they were constantly stopping you in your daily routine for no real reason? Causing you to be late to appointments, late to work, late to pick up the kids, late to interviews, possibly lose jobs because of it, etc etc. I imagine if I were subjected to that sort of disrespectful and intrusive treatment I’d be less inclined to greet every police officer with a “Hello officer, yes sir, no sir” sort of attitude. I’m white and it’s really not that hard for me to understand.
wuzzat
@Cluttered Mind: More fun: It’s Cincy. At least a third of the greater metropolitan area is in Indiana and Kentucky, where front plates aren’t required. The only reason a cop would pull someone over for not having a front plate is if they were absolutely desperate for a reason to pull that person over. It is literally more reasonable to get pulled over for having fuzzy dice hanging from your review mirror than for not having a front plate in Cincinnati.
arcadesproject
@A guy: So you make a move, any move, including one intended to comply with an order, and you an be shot in the head until dead.?
Procopius
@Another Holocene Human:
Are you really sure you want to replace the current forces with Blackwater? Erik Prince? Really sure?