Here’s the story.
Update (12:40am): Three of the officers have died, I just read.
“On Saturday, people lingered at the scene of the traffic-stop shooting. About 20 bystanders taunted the police.”
Update (Monday 1pm): The fourth officer has been declared brain dead.
Michael East is a veteran police officer in Saginaw, Michigan. He’s also an excellent writer. He has a new book coming out. Beyond Hope?
Saginaw, not that you’d know, is a pretty messed up place of rusted industry and abandonment. It’s lost about half its population. Even Habitat for Humanity is helping tear it down.
Mike’s book is great. I read an early draft. But it won’t be on sale for a few weeks.
This isn’t even in the book. It’s from an email from Mike. But it gives you a good feel:
Last Devil’s Night, a few thousand volunteers roamed the city to help prevent Saginaw’s residents from burning down these houses. We had numerous cops on overtime. My partner and I were assigned an East Side district and were told to check every abandoned house we could find and make sure the arsonists weren’t setting them up to burn (wood piles, gasoline, etc). At one house we opened the door, saw most of the floor missing and said: “Fuck this, let’s just do an outside perimeter check.” We did and moved on.
Three days later some kids playing in the neighborhood went into the same house and found a woman who had been reported missing the week prior. She had walked inside, fell through the open floor, but her leg caught on a floor beam and it snapped her leg. She hung there, upside down, for God knows how long and died a slow death. She was inside, dead, the night we decided to skip that house. Creepy.
Good stuff.
So says Ramon “Mike” Vargas (Charlton Heston) in Orson Well’s 1958 “Touch of Evil” (thanks, Dave H.).
Two Peoria, Illinois, police officers were arrested in relation to a police stomping. Here’s the story in the Peoria Journal Star.
I worry about publicizing such things because they make people think such behavior is normal for police. It’s not. Such beat downs are not common. I didn’t see them and it’s not just because police weren’t thumping people when I was around. And even if that were the case, great! Then all it takes it one decent cop to stop such things. And you know what, there are a lot of decent cops.
I just wish there more videos of cops doing good. Day-in-and-day-out, police put themselves at risk to keep the streets safe. Where are those videos? The problem is that when cops do everything right, the videos tends to be pretty boring.
In this video, I assume the cop wasn’t moving his leg up and down because he had a twitch. It looks pretty bad. Do I have sympathy for the stomped guy? Not really. He’s a drug-dealing, cop-running, and perhaps girlfriend-beating prick. But that still doesn’t make it right to stomp the SOB. Besides, now he’s going to win a lawsuit and get paid. Thanks a lot. Boy, you sure showed him.
I like to think that had that happened in front of me, I would have moved in to stop it. I’m pretty certain I would have. As soon as the stomping starts, you push the officer away and say, “What the fuck are you doing?!” End of story. But it’s not.
Then when the video comes out I stillget in trouble for not doing more. Even though comparatively I was the good guy.
Had I been there and seen everything, would I have turned in the cop? I doubt it. That same stomping cop may have saved the life of me or a friend some other time. That’s what makes it so tricky. When you have a job where you need people to cover your back and save your life, you’re going to cut them a lot of slack. How can you not? Hell, we all make mistakes.
Doing the right thing is never easy when you can’t figure out what the right thing is. And even when you try to do the right thing you can get in trouble. So best not to see anything. Best to remain ignorant. It leads to what I call the Blue Wall of Ignorance. It’s not the Blue Wall of Silence. That’s overrated.
Let’s say there was no video of this incident. Then nothing happens.
But the next time the officer who stomped the guy needs backup, maybe I’m a little slow to respond. I don’t want to be around for whatever he does because I don’t want to get in trouble for his actions. I don’t want to get in trouble simply for being present. Best to get there after everything is done. But that attitude doesn’t stop a beat down. Nor does it make anybody safer. Nobody wins.
Police that do bad things need to be socialized into good behavior by the vast majority of officers who do the right thing. But the system doesn’t let it work that way. That’s the real shame.
Policing is one of the few jobs where “cowardice” can get you fired. Here’s a fascinating storyby Brendan McCarthy in the New Orleans Times-Picayune about a police officer fired for not shooting a gun man.
They see a man standing about 50 feet away in the street, pointing a gun. Pop, pop.
…
He chose to hold his fire and let the car crawl forward. His partner… would say later that she tried to step out, but that he ordered her back into the car. He said he thought they needed cover, that they hadn’t had time to assess the situation.Within seconds, the pops stopped. The gunman fled, with Neveaux in pursuit, his partner in the passenger seat.
…
According to the New Orleans Police Department, what Neveaux did was wrong. So wrong, in fact, that internal investigators cited him for cowardice and neglect of duty. High-ranking officials conferred and confirmed. After an administrative hearing, NOPD Superintendent Warren Riley fired Neveaux.
Neveaux’s lawyer is Eric Hessler:
Nine years ago, Hessler faced a similar split-second dilemma and did what Neveaux didn’t: He shot.
Hessler, then an NOPD officer, had come upon a shooting in progress.
The man firing his weapon, 23-year-old Steven Hawkins, turned toward him and fired, Hessler said. Hessler reached for his service weapon and fired back, hitting Hawkins once and killing him.
After the smoke cleared, police learned Hawkins, a carjacking victim, had been shooting at his attackers in self-defense.
…
The NOPD stood by Hessler and deemed the shooting justifiable. A grand jury cleared him of criminal charges.The family of the deceased man sued in civil court, and a judge ordered the city last year to pay $700,000 to the man’s parents.
Damned if you, damned if you don’t. What would have I done? I don’t know. I wasn’t there.
It’s generally not good to bring a Police Chief from outside a department.
A former FBI agent? That’s not really good enough to be in charge in New York or Chicago or L.A.
The storyin the Tribune.
Shame on the St. Louis Police Department! Of course people should be able to turn over lost items to the police. Maybe it’s just a minor gambit to get more money. I’ll cool with that. After all, it’s not like there’s no vacant space in St. Louis to hold things.
Here’s the story by Heather Ratcliffe.
I don’t know what made me think of this website just now. I first saw it years ago and it just crossed my mind for some reason. It has nothing to do with police or Baltimore.
This woman rode around the abandoned Chernobyl area with nothing but a motorcycle [Ed note: kind of sort of. See comments below], a camera, and a giger counter.
I guess it does sort of remind me a bit of parts of the Eastern.
Abandonment. People used to live here. The pictures are incredible and strangely moving.
I have no special insight into this. I really don’t know what to make of it. My first thoughts are give the guy a break.
The deputy major of the Baltimore Police Department’s Eastern District has been suspended pending an internal investigation into allegations that he failed to disclose a series of text messages he exchanged with a man sought on a domestic violence warrant, days before authorities say he killed his wife.
Here’s the Sun’sreport.
And Peter Hermann’s.
Port Authority of New York and Jersey is not a bad place to work. They run all the airports and most of the bridges. I got to say, I’m a little jealous that if I were a Port Authority Police Officer, I would be making $86,467 in base pay. Still, I wouldn’t switch back. Police officers do risk more than professors. Plus, they don’t get summers off.
You can check out all the Port Authority salaries online (search under public safety). And overtime? How can you make over $120K in overtime!?
There are a lot of good police officers risking their lives and working hard for too little money in Baltimore and other poor cities around America. Baltimore City police start around $41,000. These officers need more money. Mostpolice need to be paid more (sorry my Long Island brethren, I think you’re paid just about right).
Police should be paid more than sanitation workers and firefighters. Unlike the latter two jobs, most big-city police departments are well below their budgeted staffing levels. That’s why Baltimore had to go Puerto Rico looking for cops (they found some, too).
Suffolk County has a starting salary of about $60,000 and top salary after 5 years about $100,000. And that’s not including overtime. Plus, compared to policing in a poor rough city, the job is safer (and let’s be honest, easier–though there are some poor rough parts of Long Island).
The result? No shortage of qualified applicants. You have to pay something like $100 just to takethe civil service exam. You and 29,000 others.
Is $100,000 too much for a police officer? I don’t think so. And you might notice one thing about well-paying police departments like the Port Authority and Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island. You rarely if ever hear about scandals coming of these police departments. If you pay men and women like professionals, they’re more likely to act like professionals. That shouldn’t be a surprise. At some level you get what you pay for.
I’ve always wondered and never knew how much police-related lawsuits cost the city. Last year it was $35 million for settlements related to NYPD action. That up 40% over the previous year.
The headline in the Daily News calls the $35 million figure “staggering.” It doesn’t strike me as that high. $8 a resident or $1,000 per officer? I got $8.
I was actually kind of hoping the number would be much higher. Then I could use the figure to justify higher police pay as saving money if it could reduce lawsuits.
Besides, for all agencies the city paid out $568 million in settlements and judgments last year. Now that’s too high.