Salt Lake City police Detective Jeff Payne has been fired from his part-time paramedic job as the fallout continues from his arrest of a University Hospital nurse in July. ... At one point, Payne remarks to another officer — apparently frustrated by Wubbels’ refusal to allow a blood draw — that he could retaliate against the hospital in his role as a Gold Cross paramedic. “I‘ll bring them all the transients and take good patients elsewhere,” Payne says in the footage.I'll bet that the ambulance company really winced at being dragged into this mess.
One of the things that was interesting was how the police department first tried to shuffle all of this under the rug by taking the cop off blood-draw duties, until, that is, the video went public. Then the shit hit the fan.
Sort of like the James Blake incident, which the NYPD officers involved tried to cover up until the video went public. The NYPD, itself, eventually did try to sweep it under the rug. Mr. Blake wasn't happy about that.
I don't doubt that the majority of cops are decent people. But a percentage of them are thugs with badges and they act that way. The thugs are poisoning the view that the people that they police have of them. The cops need to clean up their own mess. Should they not, then sooner or later, it will be done to them. Smirky the Racist Elf can dismiss and refuse to bring civil rights actions, but Smirky's not going to be the AG forever.
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If he's still a paramedic by day's end, I'll be amazed. Once the police properly understand what the multitude of cameras really mean for them, the Thin Blue Line will crack around the bad eggs.
Not until they start firing the cops who help cover things up. Like the North Charleston shooting or the one of that kid in Chicago.
One the accomplices start to be busted, then maybe there will be some slow change.
Bobby Seale is exactly correct: "The cell phone is the best piece of technology we got to observe cops. You can have an international cop watch program without a gun."
A comment by Nurse Wubbels stood out to me- she didn't like how Payne et. al. were acting, but it bothered her more that none of the other police officers there stood up for her, or the law, or anything.
I later read one tried to quietly tell Payne he was being stupid, but maybe she didn't notice because the cuffs went on or something, I don't know.
And we keep getting circuit court victories for the right to record the police on duty, which is as it should be because we are paying them to work for us.
Bobby Seale is still hell on wheels after all of these years, and his daughter runs an outfit she calls Urban ReLeaf that improves poor neighborhoods by planting trees in them. Their multigenerational dedication to their communities is right out of the best traditions of this country, and that was my congresswoman, Barbara Lee in the video, presenting him with the award, so he has made his mark around here, anyway.
I keep thinking of the post BadTux did the other day, where he talked about the damage from the "100,000 new cops on the street" thing that Bill Clinton did, with its lowering of standards of admission that let a wave of Nazis, militia goons, and white supremacists into the police forces across the country. Those bozos have now been there for twenty years, and are running things in many cases.
I doubt there is any realistic way to remove them, so perhaps we should focus on the recruitment and training of new officers, along with sane and realistic guidelines for their conduct on duty.
It's rare and difficult to get cops to police other cops, but it does happen from time to time, like back in the eighties when the OHA cops were so out out of control and infamously corrupt that OPD and the sheriff's office set them up and shut them down.
But even in that case, some of them slunk off to corrupt other forces, most notably the SF parks department cops.
I guess power corrupts, and some are more susceptible to it than others.
-Doug in Oakland
As I said to a co-worker(another cop) of a cop whom I reported for misconduct after he told me that "most cops aren't like that":
"Y'all wear the same uniform, and if I shoot even a BAD COP, ALL Cops will come down harder...because Cop.... If you know he's a bad one, and you and other cops don't chase him out of your force, then don't bitch when you are all tarred with the same brush".
Didn't make a friend that day....
As long as other cops excuse bad behavior because the perpetrator is another cop, and as long as they fail to step up when another cop is doing wrong in their presence (even during an arrest) then cops will not have the respect they think they are due.
How many cops are bad cops? Well, we know, thanks to the Seattle Police department, that it's at least 10% of cops. Because that's how many cops sued when new policies were handed down, saying that they had a constitutional right to violate the constitutional rights of the citizenry so there, already!
10%.
That ain't a few bad apples, boys and girls. That's roughly 90,000 bad cops out of the 900,000 or so cops in America. That's a lot of frickin' cops!
BatTux, I think you meant "no right".
What that bit in Seattle was all about was removing the cops' "qualified immunity" for violating civil rights. If there are rules that say "no, you can't be doing that shit", then they become personally liable for damages if they do that shit.
No no, 10% of the cops in Seattle said they had a constitutional right to violate the constitutional rights of the citizenry! Yes, that was their argument in the lawsuit, that a policy saying they *couldn't* violate the constitutional rights of the citizenry was a violation of the cop's constitutional right to violate the constitutional rights of the citizenry.
"Just a few bad apples" my fine feathered ass....
Yea, but that leaves the 90%...who generally won't "out" the dirty/bad ones. Now, I understand there is the bond of us vs them, the constantly dealing with the violent, the criminal, the angry, etc. But, there has to be a way to start weeding out the bad actors and restoring (I say restoring, but some groups have never had a reason to trust cops before) the confidence in the police.
This goes back to a number of things:
1) Crime has clearly fallen since the late 80's, just about the time that the removal of leaded gasoline reached the 12-15 year mark. Serious studies have shown that a decent percentage of the fall in crime can be linked to the removal of leaded gas, since areas removed it at differing times and the drops corresponded with those timelines projected forward.
2) The size of prison populations and police forces has not fallen at the same time.
3) The training in unarmed and non-lethal force for police forces has been curtailed or ended. In the 80's, a cop was naked without a PR-24 or similar baton, and was trained to use it. Now we have ASP's and no training, and we wonder why the cops reach for their pistols.
4) For a long time the police were protected by the complicity of ignorant white people. We openly questioned if what the rappers and dealers were saying was true. We suggested they asked for it or deserved it. Then cameras all over started recording officers beating the crap outta people for no discernible reason, they started recording police saying what they thought, they started capturing people dying for no good reason.
At some point, an inflection point must be reached. Either the good cops will rise up and cast out the bad actors, or the American police will turn into a more heavily armed version of Mexican local police. I wish I know which way it will go!
CP88, it was only for a brief time between roughly 1975 and 1995 that cops even gave lip service to being professional and respecting the rights of the citizenry. The brutal behavior of cops prior to that was because the wealthy and white middle class wanted the cops to keep the poors (especially the darkies) well suppressed, and looked the other way when cops rode horses up the aisles of black churches and pistol-whipped the pastor, or went "nigger-knocking" in black neighborhoods, or etc. Brutality and violation of civil rights wasn't a bug in our police forces. It was a feature, a feature that was quite desired by the voters who elected the politicians who hired the police chiefs who hired the police officers.
The only bug in today's police forces, from the perspective of those same people, is that today's police officers sometimes forget their place and do to the rich or white middle class what they once only did to the poors. That's the bug that has (some) people upset. Still not enough to motivate cities to clean up their police forces though. After all, still gotta keep the niggers and wiggers in their place and how ya gonna do that without violent brutal police officers violating their civil rights left and right?!
- Badtux the Cynical Penguin
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