Posted on 07/20/2009 6:03:46 AM PDT by grjr21
Edited on 07/20/2009 6:29:15 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
WHEN AGNES LAWLESS and three friends were inside a Lukoil convenience store in the Northeast at 3 a.m. last August, they'd all but forgotten the fender-bender in which they'd been involved moments earlier.
There was little damage, and the other driver had left the scene, near Northeast Philadelphia Airport.
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
In Philly? No way, no DA there has the balls to take on the corrpution in the Police and City hall, especially for some poor schmuck with no money or connections.
There are plenty of systems where “nobles” control the things you mentioned:
1. Soviet or Chinese communism. The nomenklatura class controls all these things. Everyone else is peasant.
2. State capitalism, e.g., in Nazi Germany
3. bureaucratic welfare state capitalism—what we have incrementally been living under since the Progressives of the early 1900s or perhaps FDR. But it’s not quite as bad, yet, as under the USSR or National Socialism.
4. Ancien Regime absolutist mercantilism (1600s, 1700s)
5. Ancient imperial Rome
See, you’re hung up on “nobles.” There has always been a group of powerful owners of resources. They are called nobles in the Middle Ages and so you think that that’s the only time a “nobility” has controlled these resources.
But the nomenklatura class of the USSR or the Wall-Strett-White-House axis of the present administration are also forms of noble rule.
But within systems of “rule by elites” (which is really what “nobles” means), you can have immense variation, both in the degree to which the elites own all these resources and the degree of impunity with which they govern.
All I’m saying is that on the scale of impunity, thuggishness and totality of control of resources, the worst regimes have all been post-1500, not pre-1500.
Peasants had rights and recourse to law for redress of their rights. You had not rights, to speak of, under Henry VIII in England. You could be condemned without trial, either condemned to death or to property confiscation or whatever. If you were one of the abosolute monarch’s cronies you were fine, as long as you propped up the absolute monarch.
That was not true in the Middle Ages. Real checks on the power of the king by the nobles and bishops and on the power of bishops and nobles by the kings existed. Were they perfect? No. The system of checks and balances established by the American founders was as good as it gets.
But notice what’s happening: the older check and balance system (nobles and bishops checking kings, kings checking nobles and bishops) failed because of a combination of corruption (non-virtuous rulers at all levels) and greedy power-grabbing by the kings who managed to reduce/eliminate the nobles/bishops as checks on their power.
In reaction to that, the middle class overthrew the absolute kings and decided not to trust in feudum, in personal honor alone but to put trust in a written constitution.
It worked pretty well, as long as those entrused in governing under it were honorable and virtuous, as the Founders were truly honorable and virtuous. But eventually, as we shifted from honor and virtue as key qualifications for the “nobles” (and yes, we had our elites, our Nobles throughout American history, from Washington, Jefferson down through Lincoln) to technical prowess and “value-neutral” “problem-solving” (FDR’s Brain Trust marks the shift)as the key, we handed ourselves over to the bureaucratic state.
We’d be better off with feudum as the key to government than with cleverness and technocratic prowess.
Just something to think about before you throw around “feudal” or “medieval” as cheap descriptions for whatever you despise about the present.
Our problem is not that we have elites governing us. There’s no way to avoid that. Even if you manage to distribute land and wealth among small stake-holders (which was the key to American virtue from the 1600s to the late 1800s), you will still have elites (nobles) among that relatively more widely distributed ownership of resources. Likewise, you can have relatively more concentrated ownership of resources and still have relatively virtuous elites governing. Or you can have concentration of resource ownership and have unvirtuous, thuggish, evil elites governing.
Our problem is lack of honor, lack of virtue among our governing elites, which is directly traceable to the abandoning of Judaeo-Christian virtue in the formation of new generations. We went from “what’s right” to “what works” as the criterion of evaluation.
In the much-maligned pre-1500 Middle Ages, they did still ask, “what is right?” not merely “what works?”
Clearly, this man was deeply unqualified for this position and awarded it only to fill a quota. I can only imagine the stress and suffering he must endure every day in a job clearly beyond his capacity.
Yeah; my heart bleeds for the cowardly SOB. They certainly shouldn't punishment any more than firing his ass, and sending him away for a few years, along with his punk son.
And the article says they declined to prosecute the cop and he was given his gun again!
That JBT ought to get in trouble fore pushing those other two guys around, as well.
America is no longer a free country. The KGB, or maybe Stasi, is firmly entrenched in the guise of our "police force".
Fixed it.
This girl was white, the cop and his son were Messican.
If anyone ever wonders why blacks hate cops, consider how more frequently blacks are abused by cops AND consider how often there is no recourse against the Ubermensch in the blue uniform.
In this case, Mr. Ubermensch, and his uniformed friends, illegally assaulted a female, falsified a report, under color of law attempted to compel a witness to lie, illegally jailed the victim to force her to change her story, ad nauseam.
The DA and the “Internal Investigation Board both whitewashed the case. Mr. Ubermensch in back on hte street, once again the “Armed & Dangerous” stalk the streets, uniformed and above any law, and do it on our tax dollars.
Remember this well:
The reason such behavior is condoned is to condition the public to the abuses of a police state. Whether a white girl in a convenience store who was rear ended by a cop’s son or a black abused by the cops - both are used to condition the public to accept the increasing tyranny of a socialist government.
You babble. Honorable soldiers, honorable police officers, honorable teachers, honorable governors, honorable mothers and honorable fathers know the difference between abuse of power and honorably exercised power.
Take your cheap, anarchic shots. People like you are the problem. Here we have a clear example of abuse of power you you take a shotgun blast at all exercise of power.
It’s the hard work of distinguishing between abuse of power and honorable exercise of power (which all mothers, fathers, policement, soldiers, business owners have to exercise) that makes a society healthy.
Office Lopez abused power. Some others covered for him. He deserves to have the book thrown at him. But only if it is possible for honorable police officials to do that, honestly and honorably, can proper law enforcement take place.
It was the same in the particular period when “feudum” was the label. I’m a hell of a lot more hardheaded and unomantic about it than you are. You are the romantic because you limpwristedly wave your hand at the problem instead of analyzing it.
I want honor and loyalty and virtue and decency in my government today and I have studied carefully how this has and has not functioned under various systems of political and social and economic organization in the past. And among the worst of those systems are a number of the post-1500s systems. One of the best is post-1500 (ours, from 1750-1900 or thereabouts).
But grandiose dismissals like yours are part of the reason we are in the shape we are in. People don’t want to do the hard work of distinguishing the good from the bad. It’s easier to broadbrush.
“I can see if it’s one bad cop but the ones covering up for him are as responsible as the bad ones”.
The rot is nation wide and far too many departments are no longer committed to their oath of office but to their department and their fellow officers.
That they are a bunch of thugs in uniform is, in the end, our fault. The public can remove the Police Chief at each election, or recall him if abuses are too egregious to wait for the next election.
Control your servants or they will control you.
She's a fool with a fool's temper. The LEO should be fired and prosecuted for coming into that scene the way he did with his gun drawn and shoving people around. But the way she reacted with her hysterics was very dangerous for herself and her companions.
“Jest call me Xena!”
Naw, Xena would have destroyed his gun as well as his firearm.
This has always happened throughout history. Power + human nature corrupts.
Why is the cop not charged with filing a false police report like we would?
With the tape available, the city prosecutor still went forward with prosecuting lawless. What were they thinking?
Why was Lopez Jr. not charged with assault?
Why was Lopez Sr. and other officers not charged with attempting to tamper with evidence for trying to get the tapes erased?
DA decided NOT to charge Lopez Sr. Jr. or other officers, but decided to charge Lawless, although tape would exonerate her.
Corruption all around.
While unavoidable in this case, avoid contact with the government’s police.
What was the purpose of this article, it is a rehash of the initial events (that occurred almost a year ago) plus information about the Internal Affairs investigation (when was it concluded). There are a lot of words but nothing about the experience of the officer nor his record, I doubt this level of rage occurred (out of the blue) without previous incidents.
It seem, quite often, that police departments are reluctant to take action against an officer because the fear this will be seen as an admission of liability. Instead they choose to reinstate someone who clearly does not have the temperament to be a police officer and whose action appears to be criminal. The probability of another incident is very high.
>Lawless was standing at the counter of the store [snip] when she was grabbed from behind and violently pushed back with a police officer’s gun in her face.
Obviously standard arrest procedure. [/sarc][/cynic]
>After a chaotic struggle, Lawless was arrested and charged with assaulting the officer.
>
>Lawless and her three friends, all in their early 20s, filed complaints with the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau. But in cases in which it’s a defendant’s word against a police officer’s, the benefit of doubt often falls to the cop.
>
>Except when there’s video.
Ah, so five witnesses [the four friends & the clerk] against a cop and possibly his son needs to be corroborated with video footage?
>The incident provides a vivid example of how the countless video recordings generated today by security cameras and cell phones are affecting police work.
Because accountability is a *bad* thing? Or because it reveals that the police CAN be corrupt, malicious, and/or petty?
>Drexel Law School professor Donald Tibbs said that video recordings are capturing more criminal activity and assisting prosecutions, but they’re also monitoring police conduct.
>
>”Police are now aware they’re more accountable for their actions, because these tapes may be used against them in misconduct cases or civil-rights lawsuits,” Tibbs said.
As it should be, in my opinion.
>The clerk on duty the night that Lopez confronted Lawless told investigators that three times after the incident, police officers spoke with him about the security tape and that two asked if he would erase it.
Could somebody explain how this ISN’T obstruction of justice and/or [attempting to] destroy evidence?
>Lopez grabbed Lawless’ neck from behind with his left hand, with his gun in his right hand. Lawless broke free and faced him.
>
>”I was really confused,” Lawless said in an interview. “I didn’t know if we were getting robbed. I remember seeing his uniform on his arm, he swung me around and hit me with his arm. He hit me first with an open hand, then he hit me with his gun in the face.”
>
>The video shows Lopez’s left arm extending toward Lawless’ face, and then his right arm driving forcefully toward her, jamming the gun in her neck or jaw.
How is this not assault? How is this not assault with a deadly weapon? (Granted he’s hitting her with the gun and not shooting at her...) And how could it be, as claimed, resisting arrest? (Nobody mentioned Miranda rights, nor does a surprise assault from behind seem to be standard arrest procedure...) How is this not a case of self defense on the part of Lawless AS WELL AS a case of “deprivation of rights under color of law” on part of the officer? (4th Amendment protects people from unreasonable search and seizure [arrest], Also, Conspiracy Against Rights could be applicable, see Sec 241 & 242 http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sup_01_18_10_I_20_13.html )
>Lawless broke free again, and for several seconds the video shows the three young men sitting on the floor, while arguing occurs among all four and Officer Lopez and his son.
>
>”I had noticed his son as the guy who had hit us,” Lawless said, “and [Officer Lopez] was screaming, ‘You think you can hit my son and get away with it, you think you can f-— with me?’ “
>
>The store clerk reported hearing similar comments from Officer Lopez.
See, five witnesses.
>”I remember stopping for a second, and thinking, like, ‘This is out of control, I need to go get a real cop or something,’ “ Lawless said. “I was really scared.”
Indeed, this man WAS out of control. Criminally so.
>Ruiz, the Lukoil clerk, told investigators that after officers arrived following the altercation in the convenience store, he heard Officer Lopez give his son some instructions in Spanish, including, “ ‘Say he had a gun.’ “
Oh, MORE conspiracy! It is defined as “two or more people.”
>”I’m troubled by the conduct of the officer, about his telling a story that lacks credibility, and about the fact he thought he could get away with it,” Yatvin said.
>
>He said it’s also troubling that so many officers apparently sought to dispose of the video, the key evidence in the case, and suffered no consequence after Internal Affairs investigated.
Indeed, that is very troubling indeed. Almost moreso than the incident itself because they are actively seeking to deny accountability on the part of an official’s (the officer) actions.
I have the troubling feeling that, had I (or some other National Guardsman) been there and opened fire on this domestic enemy of the Constitution (as noted above; and thusly fulfilling our sworn duty) we would be facing criminal trial and, quite probably, a guilty verdict.
I’d be the last one to paint all cops with such a broad brush.
Sadly, certain metropolitan agencies do seem to have a long-standing and well-earned record for these types of incidents.
Unfortunately, change must come from the inside.
Not all of us have the privilege and responsibility of a gun and a badge, and this young lady’s options are sure to run their course.
I see that Philadelphia’s “Finest” have not changed much in the 20 years since I lived there. The only difference is that 20 years ago the cop’s name would more likely have been Murphy or Ianucci than Lopez.
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