Posted on 01/09/2015 9:54:13 AM PST by Kaslin
It’s probably not a fun time to be a police officer. The deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York have led some – including the Mayor of New York City – to explicitly or implicitly accuse cops of systemic racism.
And then you have folks like me, who grouse about cops for reprehensible abuse of citizens as part of the drug war, as well as disgusting examples of theft using civil asset forfeiture.
Heck, any decent person should get upset about some of the ways law enforcement officials abuse their powers. Consider these excerpts from a nightmarish story out of Houston.
Chad Chadwick has something many citizens can only covet – a spotless record. …But on the night of September 27th, 2011 Chadwick’s commitment to living within the law did him no good at all. It started when a friend concerned for Chadwick’s emotional well-being called Missouri City police to Chad’s Sienna apartment where he’d been distraught, drinking and unknown to anyone, had gone to sleep in the bathtub. A SWAT team was summoned.
I’m not sure why a SWAT team was needed in this case, but that’s not the horrific part of the story.
Here’s what then happened.
“They told a judge I had hostages. They lied to a judge and told him I had hostages in my apartment and they needed to enter,” said Chadwick. …Chadwick’s firearm possession apparently prompted SWAT to kick in his door, launch a stun grenade into the bathroom and storm in, according to Chadwick, without announcing their identity.
“While I had my hands up naked in the shower they shot me with a 40 millimeter non-lethal round,” said Chadwick. A second stun grenade soon followed. “I turned away, the explosion went off, I opened my eyes the lights are out and here comes a shield with four or five guys behind it. They pinned me against the wall and proceeded to beat the crap out of me,” said Chadwick. That’s when officers shot the unarmed Chadwick in the back of the head with a Taser at point blank range. …And it wasn’t over. “They grabbed me by my the one hand that was out of the shower and grabbed me by my testicles slammed me on my face on the floor and proceeded to beat me more,” said Chadwick. Chadwick, who hadn’t broken a single law when SWAT burst through his door, was taken to the Ft. Bend County Jail with a fractured nose, bruised ribs and what’s proven to be permanent hearing loss. He was held in an isolation cell for two full days.
Did Mr. Chadwick then get a profuse apology when it was determined that he hadn’t broken any laws?
Not exactly.
Ft. Bend County District Attorney John Healy sought to indict Chadwick on two felony counts of assaulting a police officer, but a Grand Jury said no law was broken. …but Healy’s prosecutors tried misdemeanor charges of resisting arrest, calling more than a dozen officers to testify. Those charges were dropped as well.
The government eventually did figure out a way to get Mr. Chadwick into court, but it didn’t turn out so well.
A month ago, three years after the SWAT raid, a jury found Chad Chadwick not guilty of interfering with police. With tears in their eyes members of the jury offered the exonerated defendant comforting hugs. “They tried to make me a convict. It broke me financially, bankrupted me. I used my life savings, not to mention, I lost my kids,” said Chadwick.
This is one of these cases where I hope Mr. Chadwick sues and gets generously compensated (and I would want any damages to be financed out of the budgets of the officials who misbehaved).
Defenders of the police will argue, quite correctly, that we shouldn’t smear entire police forces, or the overall justice system, simply because there are some bad cops and unethical prosecutors.
That’s certainly the right attitude, though it’s worth noting that sometimes the “culture” of a police force can get so poisonous that wholesale dismissal is the only way to get better performance.
Here are some passages from a New York Times report about a city in New Jersey that got far better results by firing its entire police force.
It has been 16 months since Camden took the unusual step of eliminating its police force and replacing it with a new one run by the county. …the old force had all but given up responding to some types of crimes. Dispensing with expensive work rules, the new force hired more officers within the same budget — 411, up from about 250.
It hired civilians to use crime-fighting technology it had never had the staff for.…Average response time is now 4.4 minutes, down from more than 60 minutes, and about half the average in many other cities. …In June and July, the city went 40 days without a homicide — unheard-of in a Camden summer. …And while the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., has drawn attention to long-simmering hostilities between police departments and minority communities, Camden is becoming an example of the opposite. “We’re not going to do this by militarizing streets,” Chief Thomson said. Instead, he sent officers to knock on doors and ask residents their concerns. He lets community leaders monitor surveillance cameras from their home computers to help watch for developing crime.
An even more dramatic example comes from Georgia, a country of 5 million people wedged between Russia and Turkey.
As part of a series of reforms to create free markets and honest government, all 15,000 cops from the State Traffic Inspection Office were fired.
Georgian authorities chose a radical method of reforming the police structures which were not working. …The State Traffic Inspection was one of the most corrupt units in the Georgian government. It was almost totally self-financed, fleecing both local and foreign drivers as they traveled Georgian roadways. According to estimates, 80 percent of the money extorted from drivers was distributed along the chain of command all the way up to the minister. …In early summer of 2004, Merabishvili eliminated the State Traffic Inspection, firing all fifteen thousand employees in a single day! Two months later, in August 2004, the force was replaced by competitive hiring of employees for the newly formed US-style highway patrol. During the two-month transition period there was no policing of the roads, and yet the number of car accidents did not increase. There were no riots.
The part about nothing bad happening when there were no cops is especially revealing.
Sort of like how nothing bad happened during the sequester, even though President Obama warned of terrible consequences (humorously captured by these cartoons).
Or when we got welfare reform in the 1990s and poverty went down instead of increasing as the left predicted.
But now let’s defend cops, who actually help fulfill one of the few legitimate functions of government. And there are two reasons they deserve defending.
First, the vast majority of them almost certainly are good and decent people who simply want to help others by fighting and deterring crime. That’s a real value.
Second, almost all of the bad stories about cops exist because politicians have enacted bad laws. I’ve made this point about the drug war. I’ve made this point about asset forfeiture. And I’ve made this point in the case of Eric Garner.
If politicians didn’t criminalize victimless behavior, most horror stories would disappear.
And if politicians didn’t treat police departments as backdoor vehicles for taking money from citizens, there would be no need for some of the unfortunate interactions that now occur between cops and citizens.
Now let’s defend the police from a very incendiary charge. Are cops racists, as some protesters (and government officials) would like us to believe?
Well, I’m sure there are some racist cops (of all colors), just as there are racist accountants, truck drivers, bureaucrats, and even economists. But the real issue is whether racism is a pervasive problem.
And when looking at one of today’s hot-button issues, the answer seems to be no. Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute has some compelling evidencethat the police do not disproportionately kill blacks.
…understanding the relationship between African-American communities and law enforcement requires a deeper analysis than a single headline… One simple way to check for bias is to see whether the number of violent crimes needed to explain one police-related death is different depending on one’s race. …
We divide the number of violent crimes by the arrest-related deaths for each race. The quotient tells us, on average, how many violent crimes it takes, by race, to produce one arrest-related death. If police are unambiguously racist, then it should take fewer violent crimes to induce one death in the African-American community. As the chart shows, according to our data, African Americans and white Americans have roughly the same proportion of violent crimes to police-related deaths. …These numbers are strikingly similar. The difference between them is small, and not statistically significant. …police appear to be treating the races the same.
But that hasn’t stopped the Obama Administration from subsidizing a group that produced a video that seemingly condones cop killing.
The Obama administration’s Justice Department funneled at least $1.5 million in grants to a New York legal-aid group featured in a new rap video that depicts two young black men aiming handguns at a white police officer. …The video for “Hands Up,” which also shows a white police officer gunning down a black motorist wearing a hoodie, contains lyrics suggesting revenge for much-publicized deaths of black men in confrontations with police. …The organization, which was founded in 1997 and boasts some high-powered corporate lawyers on its board, has enjoyed a steady flow of taxpayer dollars since President Obama took office in 2009.
This is disgusting.
Accusing cops of systemic racism without evidence is bad enough, but to subsidize a group that glorifies cop killing is downright evil.
But the bottom of line of this post is that our main problem is too many laws that are either designed to collect revenue or to dictate private behavior.
That’s where reforms should focus, not on vilifying the average cop.
P.S. I can’t resist sharing an amusing anecdote about cops. Several years ago, I spoke at the Liberty Forum in New Hampshire, a conference connected with the Free State Project. Many of the participants were avid practitioners of “open carry,” which meant they had handguns strapped to their sides. At one point, I was riding with several of these folks down the elevator at the conference hotel and a family got in. A young boy noticed all their weapons and asked “Are you guys cops?” One of them cheerfully responded, “No, we’re the good guys.”
P.P.S. On the other hand, I also have a less-than-amusing anecdote.
My way of answering those false charges is listing just a few of the stories which have been discussed here on FR. They should be immediately below this post.
Man charged for shooting when cops went to wrong house (Jury finds him innocent) WAVY ^ | July 15, 2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3180907/posts
Sober woman arrested for DWI after deputy rolls through stop sign NewsChannel 3 WTKR ^ | May 2, 2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3154158/posts
Elderly man calls for ambulance, violent cops beat him instead daily caller ^ | 4-21-14 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3147475/posts
Horror: Cops tackle, beat, pepper-spray, pin, suffocate, kill innocent man Daily Caller ^ | 02/25/2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3127187/posts
Wisconsin Police Chief Pleads No Contest to Harassing Tea Party Leader The La Crosse Tribune ^ | 7/26/2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3185371/posts
Six-year-old girl watches in horror as police 'shoot dead her dog Apollo in her front yard 7/28/2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3186053/posts
NYPD officer pictured 'putting seven-months pregnant woman into a chokehold for illegally grilling outside her apartment' July 28, 2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3186193/posts
Man beaten, three SAPD officers investigated for possible excessive force July 24, 2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3187839/posts
Officer Puts Gun To Boy’s Throat In McDonald’s Drive Thru For Taking Too Long | Aug 2, 2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3188244/posts
San Antonio police mistake photographer for fleeing drug suspect, beat him silly Washington Post ^ | July 29, 2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3186590/posts
Trooper filmed 'brutally beating woman on side of California Hwy (For Her "Protection") Daily Mail ^ | 7-4-2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3176062/posts
A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son Salon ^ | June 24, 2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3172322/posts
Veteran Stopped for No Front License Plate, Beat to Death by 5 Cops 5/19/2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3157894/posts
Officer shot in road rage clash also indicted Pioneer Press ^ | 8-10-14 | http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3191425/posts
Off-Duty LAPD Officer Apparently Pointing Gun in Photo NBC Bay Area ^ | Sunday, Aug 10, 2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3191691/posts
Chief: Police killed California robbery hostage [police shot hostage 10 times]] Associated Press ^ | August 11, 2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3191771/posts
St. Paul police officer allegedly left scene of (His) accident Pioneer Press ^ | 8-11-14 |http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3191748/posts
South Florida Man Fights Back After Felony Arrest Liveleak.com ^ | 08/21/2014 | http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3195726/posts
Connecticut trooper pleads guilty to stealing dying motorcycle crash victim’s jewelry, moneyNY Daily News ^ | Thursday, July 17, 2014, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3196069/posts
Eyewitnesses recall the day when Brandon Ellington Drown in the Lake of the Ozarks (State Trooper caused drowning) Kansas City Star ^ | 8-23-14 | http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3196495/posts
Texas cops defend pulling over mother of four at gunpoint Sun News Network ^ | 8-25-14 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3196759/posts
Cop Hits Man in the Head 20 Times as Onlookers Plead 'Don't Punch Him No More 'Reason ^ | August 25, 2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3196991/posts
Kentucky: Lawsuit Restored Against Cop Caught Lying About Traffic Stop theNewspaper ^ | 8/26/2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3197342/posts
(Police) Corruption in the City of Waldo exposed (FL) Ocala Post ^ | August 28, 2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3198777/posts
Oklahoma City cop charged with sexually assaulting eight women is released on bondNY Daily News ^ | 9/7/14 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3201380/posts
SC trooper charged with felony in shooting at traffic stop over seat belt violationThe State ^ 09/24/2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3208138/posts
Man killed by cops after car thief alleges meth find (No drugs found) Atlanta Journal-Constitution ^ | 03 Oct 14 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3211655/posts
SEE IT: NYPD cop allegedly took $1,300 in cash from Brooklyn construction worker’s pocket http://www.nydailynews.com ^ | october 8, 2014 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3212986/posts
So what you’re suggesting as long as cops and their unions get what they want and continue to be paid and rewarded to enforce them, they’ll continue to do exactly what they’re told?
All because the more punitive laws created, the more tax money they get?
Hmmm.
BTW, I never ever once saw any national, highly public movement like that?
Can I see the link?
Thanks
In New York, the police came out to protest the "oppressive" law that tried to bar them from fixing tickets of relatives and friends
LOL!
The popo is not your friend.
Amen to that!
To paint cops or laws with a broad brush is like blaming Big Oil, Big Insurance, Big Medicine or Big Fast Food. It lets piss ants rant about the injustices they bring on themselves.
The police didn’t become an adversary to the people until the people decided to have them become their nanny and then didn’t like nanny’s rules.
Until we value and accept individual responsibility, no amount of bad legislation or enforcement of the same is going to fix lazy, bad values.
They are called Oath Keepers (and I can’t cut and paste from this device).
So perhaps the thing to do is to clean up the legal environment in which the police operate, and BTW, the lions share of that is going to be a rat’s nest of precedent law. Our lovely lawyerly representatives routinely write code so full of holes that the real meaning of the law is hammered out by the courts far from the prying eyes of the voters. Everything on the books is interpreted through this lens, so it really is a matter of what “is” is :(
Get real...
There are also many good nurses and some that should have never become nurses. The same with teachers
Yea on I-75 going through Valdosta to Tifton where they hide on the overpasses and off ramps.
It’s one place no one wants to speed and yes if I got caught speeding then it is my fault as I knew the speed limit.
I highly doubt that those against the death penalty ever considered this as an outcome that would gradually become the case.....not thinking so much of the terrorist drama currently unfolding but of many other instances where the MO seems to be more of a 'shoot first and ask questions later' than it ever has been in the past.
Disagree, the real problem is black crime. For a so called minority, the blacks are responsible for an overwhelming amount of violent crime. Hence they will have more interactions with police.
There were some speed traps many years here in my town, where the cops set at the bottom of of some hills. You practically had to ride your brakes all the way down so you were able to keep the speed limit. One of the judges here in our courthouse made them stop.
If “a spotless record” can be so effortlessly besmirched, I would submit that “record” carries no weight then as a measure of one’s character. Jesus Christ was, after all, a “criminal”.
Exactly
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