Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/18/cop-who-intimidated-a-group-of.html
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So in Hartford you’re not allowed to exist on your own private property with the lights out? Would this depend on whether you live in a “good” or “bad” part of town, and/or be dependent on your skin color?
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I wonder if perhaps he was unpopular within his precinct or department - maybe he slept with the boss’s wife or declined to take a cut of bribes - and they were happy to cashier him. Because police unions do not let cops get fired for this kind of behavior alone.
Then again, maybe someone on the porch was connected.
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Whatever the real reason he got fired was:
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Absolutely. A happy outcome is a happy outcome.
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Or maybe the union is a touch savvier than in other cities and is waiting a few months to come back with a grievance and back pay. That is a common outcome in these firings, just most police protection units are dumb enough to keep the heat on by talking to the media about fighting the firing.
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They said there was another traffic incident as well. Maybe the cost of defending a civil suit and backing this guy was greater than just letting him go. There have been two cases of cops being found guilty and sentenced time for bad shoots in the last couple months. Maybe slowly this, coupled with the mounting evidence from dash cams and body cams, the increased cost of defending civil suits, and and increased public awareness making cases against the cops/city go against them, they are starting to take measure to clean house.
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The problem is that departments and cops don’t pay for their own legal defense. Unions do. Maybe the unions are feeling strapped?
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IIRC cities sometimes foot the bill. Probably depends on who did what and what kind of lawsuit.
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I think the problem may have been using the word “happy” and talking about shootings helping his bottom line. Such honesty, on camera, makes other cop shootings look suspect.
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I kinda feel like the real reason he was fired was for admitting that
Which is a dirty little secret about extra judicial murder. It pays well and has the perk of getting time off.
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I tell you, if I had a job where I got a paid vacation every time I shot someone, the city would need to open an extra morgue and take on some more coroners. Talk about workplace incentive programs!
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Bad joke, /s or not.
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On reflection, I agree.
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But that’s so minor, compared to stuff cops do.
Trigger Happy?
Good name for nothing.
The fact that it was delivered in such a low-pressure situation(potentially even the fact that he didn’t actually shoot anyone) probably didn’t help.
Actually shooting someone is obviously more serious; but raising the moral stakes like that has the effect of inducing anyone with a commitment to the idea that it couldn’t be as egregious as it looks(whether out of general just-world theory, specific tribal identification with the police and against the other, a self-defensive hope that bad things couldn’t possibly happen to people as good or better than them because feeling acutely defenseless against bad things is just too grim; or colleagues and departments who neither want to tarnish their reputations nor set the expectation that they will be dealt with harshly) to go frantically looking for justifications for that view.(any of the usual ‘hard job’/‘thin blue line’/‘fear of his life’/‘thought he saw him reaching for his waistband’/‘he was no angel’/‘excited delirium is caused by drug use not tasers’/etc. options will do, it’s less about the content than about the need to embrace something that fits the purpose).
Here, though, Officer Friendly essentially just came right out and said “Hi guys, I’m more or less literally criminally unsuitable for the basic duties of my job, don’t even have the decency to be vaguely ashamed or at least furtive about my rank incompetence; and am sufficiently bad at ‘command pose’ or whatever authoritative strategy was in our most recent training seminar that I resort to cliche death threats.”
That is vastly less harmful than actually making good on the threat; but for exactly that reason there’s little incentive to rally round in order to protect the moral order. Few just worlds are upset by someone who sucks at his job(and not even in an entertaining sitcom sort of way) getting pink slipped; and, if anything, punishing the loudmouth who has the temerity to say what decent people are tactful enough to just understand implicitly is something that serves to uphold the integrity of one’s belief in the desired moral order.
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Very,very true… which is why I suspect that the main reason the cop got canned was because this OPENLY dangerous cop got caught on video, that is, one that could be used to baldly demonstrate (if the cop shoots anyone in the future) that cop’s predisposition, and that the HPF was well aware of it before any shooting. They canned him to avoid the possibility of the HPF being sued if this cop shoots anyone further down the line.
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Roy Rogers horse after stud service, maybe?
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