My thoughts exactly. I think Speakman (and others like him) should face immediate and personal consequences for their actions, but removing qualified immunity by itself doesn’t make that happen. It sounds like Colorado is trying new approaches, which is encouraging.
It will if you do it right.
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Qualified immunity reform means eliminating qualified immunity as it currently exists and limiting it to it’s nominal interpretation, in which it only applies when an officer is operating strictly within legal and Constitutional guardrails. No protection against what would be considered murder, assault, rape, etc. by a non-cop and no protection if they violate someone’s civil rights. The cops in this example violated the law and the victim’s civil rights. By the strict definition of qualified immunity, they wouldn’t be protected.
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Mud flaps are optional accessories; how would that have even been an excuse to pull someone over?! FFS.
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He was driving a semi. In Ohio, mud flaps are actually required on vehicles with a gross weight over 3 tons with load. So a normal traffic stop here was justified. But this was not a normal traffic stop. Two different law enforcement agencies, a whole bunch of cops, some with weapons drawn, and a K-9 were, apparently, needed in order to write a truck driver a ticket for a missing mud flap.
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Is every cop in red state America a smooth-brained chickenshit like these MFs?
I am what one could call a “dog person.” I own two dogs of breeds that are frequently used by law enforcement and the military.
I have come to believe that cops should not be allowed to use dogs at all, except maybe the rare occasions when their sense of smell can help save a life in search and rescue operations.
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Like their use of their firearms, the dogs are treated as another controllable extension of their power to project damage from a distance. It gives the cops hard-ons.
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I just looked up the stats for Circleville on Wikipedia. From the 2020 census the population was 1.9% African-American of 13k+. I don’t know if Ohio does the traffic stop reports that includes the race of the race of the driver also. I would probably bet that the town has a alarming percentage of stops that include persons of color vs non persons of color at a greater rate if it did.
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I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me though. This town is small enough, and generally poor enough, that I wonder WTF they’re doing wasting tax dollars on a K9 unit to begin with.
I don’t live within the municipality, otherwise you’d better believe I’d be voting for a new mayor first chance I got.
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The cop has now been fired, so that’s a start, I guess.
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