You’re the employer.
Parking enforcement are community standards employees, not police. Their only “police” power is writing civil infraction tickets. Officer snapping mug shots is an officer on duty, ergo, armed. Duty Sargent? Armed. Detectives? In suits, but armed.
Officers schlep their own cruisers around in this town, though.
No way. The reason they put them on administrative leave, rather than doing a hasty arrest, is so that they don’t take any risk of messing up the prosecution. The more serious the issue, the more slowly and methodically they need to be in their response. For a case like this, it would be quite awful for prosecution to be ruined by hasty investigations or blabbering to the press. I see the same thing with many of the BLM incidents. The crowds are chanting “show us the tapes” and demanding release of all kinds of information. The prosecutors understand that these can be difficult cases to win and they need to do everything correctly. That means things like not releasing information that taints the jury pool. It means being very careful when collecting evidence. All of these factors lead them to move slowly and refrain from releasing information or statements.
As for these cops, after a long period of building the case, these officers will be charged. It will take several years before the trial starts, but it will start, and these officers will be convicted and will face decades in prison. But it’s not going to move as fast as “internet time” moves. Everyone will wonder what took so long. Well, what took so long is, when you have a strong case, you get everything right. Rushing through the system is where you make mistakes and lose what should be a winning hand.
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Do you think we will ever find a way to not arm sadists with weapons, authority, and private places to do their dirty work?
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Just like they are with other civilians, right?
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I’d like to think so, but the existing statistics aren’t in favor of this outcome.
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Not exactly just like with other civilians. Prosecuting cops is more complex because they have many types of legal immunity for their actions which non-LEOs don’t have. Any prosecutor who is serious about convicting them is going to be very methodical, will engage expert help as needed, and will in general take extra time and put in extra effort. Cops are always going to have extra defenses, including that they had immunity, their actions were consistent with policy or training, etc etc. Yeah that’s BS in this case, but the prosecutor needs to be prepared to demolish those claims as they come up.
You can’t win a case by saying the judge and jury, “Look at this video! it’s outrageous, these guys are obviously guilty!” That’s how you lose, not how you win. You win, in a clear situation like this, by not making any mistakes.
To take another example, the Ft. Hood shooting occurred in 2009. The shooter was obviously guilty of 13 deaths. No one disputed this. It took them 4 years to get a conviction and sentence, for a crime in which no one disputed the facts or the guilt of the perpetrator. And it still took 4 years! Why? Because, as I said, in a case like that, there is no hurry, and so they go in an extremely methodical way to get to the result. In such a serious case it would be truly awful to come to the end and have the whole thing compromised by a stupid mistake made in haste, when there was never a reason to rush.
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Yeah, I should have said that it’s almost as if there’s no pushback on police departments at all - which there clearly isn’t, for at least most of the country. The irony that police departments can use confiscated property to benefit their department while also never having to pay for their own misdeeds. That’s real lack of accountability…
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Yeah, but in the Ft. Hood shooting case, I doubt that the shooter was given paid leave and released into the community while the investigation and trial took place.
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Details of arrest:
18 year old … taken into … for felony drug and weapons charges … a long criminal history and has reportedly made numerous threats against law officers.
“He made the comments if we arrested him he would shoot us or kill us,” Sheriff Mike Breedlove said.
Once in jail, Breedlove said Norris was combative and was allegedly attacking other prisoners.
…
I didn’t have all the information until everything came out and then I watched the video and it was problematic, so I contacted the DA and asked for an independent investigation and he agreed, and that is where we are at – the TBI is here.”
@One_Brown_Mouse appears to be pointing out the wide disparity between the care taken in prosecuting police officers compared to the slap-dash manner in which average citizens are railroaded into guilty pleas. If police charged with serious crimes were prevented from obtaining private council, and forced to have public defenders, we could begin a conversation about diligence in investigation.
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some civilians are more equal than others, yes.
The police are civilians. They need to be reminded of this, and that it’s no punishment, it’s their ROLE.
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But they are just like other civilians, RICO statutes inclusive.
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Interesting, even with more details around the arrest my thoughts on it are the same. I can see on some level why the officers took so much pleasure in torturing the guy, if he did indeed have a history with them but torturing him makes them just as bad if not worse than that guy.
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I would figure that being strapped into a chair would be sufficient to keep him from doing it.
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If a police officer commits a crime (say, murdering a spouse while off duty, in a public place with witnesses) they do not get an internal investigation. They get arrested. Why have these people not been arrested?
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Fuck those assholes, well he should have no problem winning that case but WTF? How sick in the head are these guys,? RESISTING? REALLY? So 3 big cops cannot handle 1 teen? Sad world. They each need a tazer to the balls.
I hadn’t realzied they were off duty, nor do I know what their contract says about that scenario, I was just pointing out that “summary firing” is not a just outcome for anyone, cop or not.
No of course not, and anyone can see why the difference. The Ft Hood shooter made it very clear that he didn’t care what happened to him and would kill more if he could. These police officers, on the other hand, are making it clear that they are going to work within the justice system to minimize their prison time, which means they’re going to comply with everything they need to comply with. Come on, it’s obvious they are going to show up to their court appearances and they aren’t going to kill anyone, unlike Major Nidal. These cops are hoping that if they are lucky and everything goes their way they will get a plea bargain that could spare them serious prison time.
The other reason the prosecutor is doing so little is to avoid a lot of risks. What if he gets a great conviction and they end up finding a reason to ask for a mistrial? And the more solid of a case the prosecutor has, the more leverage he has in plea bargaining.
The “lenient” treatment of these cops isn’t showing some unfair aspect of the system. It’s the prosecutor doing the best he can to get them in prison for as long as he can. Look at how long Senator Leland Yee was out for and how long his legal process took. Same type of situation: complicated prosecution, giong for the maximum possible outcome.
For an example of when things go wrong, Sheriff Lee Baca was prosecuted for similarly bad conduct in the LA jails. His first trial ended in a mistrial. Not a good outcome! He was convicted and got 3 years in a retrial, but certainly the prosecutor would have prefered to avoid that.
No, I’m really not.
