Dildo Cop sounds like a good idea for a bad comic book.
Or the name of my next song!
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NOPE. I’m past that point with cops who behave like shit to others and think its fine.
At one time folks thought it was everyone’s right to drink, then they said NOPE and took it away, and then said YUP and gave it back.
Assholes who wear a badge and wield a gun who do shit like this need to be held to a different standard of FACING ACTUAL PUNISHMENT FOR THEIR ASSHATERY.
So take that ol’ nope and stick in the circular waste basket.
You kidding me? This is the name and outfit for this Friday night!!!
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I too thought about a bunch of logical rebuttals to this line of reasoning. Then I realized they were waving blue dildos in people’s faces, and decided logic was not the way to go.
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I’m with you on this, but it doesn’t go quite far enough.
When a cop tries to retain an attorney, they should run into a stone wall.
So they have to go back to the judge and say “I am unable to retain counsel on my own. I need the court to appoint a public defender for me.”
Then the public defender does what public defenders do; broker a plea bargain.
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No. They are entitled to and should receive a defense. But their lawyers do not need to lie in ways that insult everyone’s intelligence.
Obviously they can’t deny that their clients did the thing on the video. That is why they came up with the “it isn’t sexual harassment” idea. But they could have argued for leniency in more legitimate ways. They could have claimed the defendants were themselves victims of a culture of harassment created by even higher ranking people (if that is true, which TBH, it probably is). They could have claimed that they were stressed out from their exposure to violence in their workplace and that their employer failed to provide adequate mental health services. They could have claimed that their clients thought everyone found it funny and were just joking around, and now that they know better they are very sorry and won’t do it again. I think those defenses are pretty lame and shouldn’t actually be successful, but they are reasonable avenues for a lawyer to try when arguing for leniency on behalf of clients who are obviously guilty of the facts of the case.
But no, they have to say “waving a blue dildo in someones face isn’t sexual harassment because they did it to dudes too.”
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that’s a much better start.
Or even LEOs are not allowed to seek personal counsel, they must have counsel provided by the union or IA and then they are required to only allocute to seek a plea bargain which ends in them losing their pension.
See my comment above on what you can do with that “No”.
Nope, nope, triple nope. You never want to create a system where any class of people is restricted from equal access to counsel. It will inevitably be expanded to include the people most hurt by our current system. Our culture of impunity doesn’t come from their ability to access counsel so let’s attack that where the problem is rather than creating a special class of people with restricted rights of defense.
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Again…take that NOPE and the 2 additional ones and do with them what I told the other two people to do with them
LEOs have continually become more heinous in their behavior and abuse of power. Something has to change to ensure they begin to do what they are supposed to do in the first place. Until that changes FUCK THEM AND THE HORSE THEY RODE IN ON.
I’m all in for an up against the wall stance for the cops, but denying counsel will fall heavily on other groups and not stop the impunity. You’ll just get fewer cops charged in the first place or even more watered down charges.
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Well…since we haven’t tried it, we do not know what the results would be…do we. I am tired of the hand wringing excuses of “But a slippery slope could happen”
Fuck it…slippery slope be damned.
Then go with one of the strategies we have reason to believe will work, abolition or at least reform of the reasonable fear standard. Start holding prosecutors accountable for their role in letting killer cops get off with a paid vacation.
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Regarding whether cops should get lawyers, once you start taking away due process rights from one public sector union you are basically taking them from all public sector unions, and as a teacher I would rather we not do that.
These lawyers should be embarrassed though.
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If the right to counsel were only for the benefit of the accused, there would have been no Nuremberg trials before the executions of Nazi war criminals.
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This is exactly the same line of logic trump has used to discredit sexual assault allegations; the concept that to sexually harass or abuse someone you have to be attracted to them.
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Not one Axe Cop joke?
I am disappoint.
Perfectly reasonable decision but not one the lawyers for the City get to make or should make.
That’s up to the City which I believe is accountable to its electorate.
These are not the individual cop’s lawyers.
Ah yes, the classic “He’s a complete asshole” defence.
Here’s the complaint:
It’s well worth reading if only to have a complete rebuttal for any idiot who decides to reel out the old “an armed society is a polite society” line.
The defence is not in fact as bizarre as it might seem given that the available legislation seems rather lacking or the case is badly pleaded (or both).
The claim is that the officers’ actions created a hostile work environment against the plaintiffs because of their gender.
The pleadings are full of examples of incidents that would seem expressly calculated to create a hostile work environment and much of it is certainly related to sex but the examples affect both men and women.
Essentially, the officers in question are arseholes. Full on dude-bro douchebags. But even on the plaintiffs’ case they do appear to have been arseholes on a gender-neutral basis.
The specific kinds of harassment did vary depending on gender, yes. But perversely the very fact that they harassed so many people does indicate that the reason for the harassment was not gender only the particular expressions of it.
Oh, one of the officers is also alleged to have used the N word.
Are we surprised?
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Lawyers and dildos… it usually doesn’t go well…
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This reminds me of the insanity of the Kevenaugh hearings. No matter how you paint it, by his own actions he’s shown he is unfit for the position.
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