A simple tale of elite privilege
by digby
Six days after a trooper ticketed him for speeding in February and refused to cut him a break, Assemblyman Nelson Albano wrote a scathing letter to the head of the State Police.
The lawmaker claimed the trooper, Randy Pangborn, targeted him on his way to the Statehouse, refused to accept his temporary vehicle registration, requested backup, and had other troopers box in his car. He said he was “humiliated, embarrassed and disrespected as a legislator.”
“There was absolutely no reason to treat me like a criminal and detain two other troopers from public safety while trooper Pangborn conducted his charade,” Albano wrote from his Assembly office to State Police Superintendent Col. Rick Fuentes, requesting an internal investigation.
Normally, I would be sympathetic to any citizen being treated disrespectfully by the police. But this is a little bit different, isn’t it? He was disrespected as a legislator. (“Don’t you know who I am?”) So the lesson here isn’t that citizens deserve respectful treatment, but that one should never treat a powerful person like a criminal.
In fact, average citizens are routinely treated much worse than that, even to the point of being shot full of electricity for failing to immediately and unquestioningly comply with a police officer’s orders. But then, they aren’t as important as this fine fellow, are they?
Here’s the kicker:
But a video of the traffic stop, captured by a camera inside the trooper’s patrol car and recently obtained by The Star-Ledger, tells a different story from the one Albano described.
The trooper was respectful, calm, never raised his voice and had the lawmaker on his way in just eight minutes. Pangborn never rejected the temporary registration, and even apologized for writing the ticket. When Albano asked for a break, he politely told him to call the court.
A spokesman for the State Police, Lt. Stephen Jones, said dispatch records indicated Pangborn did not request backup. Two other patrol cars were at the scene, the video shows, but they stayed only briefly.
So it wasn’t even the mild rousting originally described but rather the simple failure to be corrupt in the face of power. The trooper should be given medal.
You might also be interested to know that the police resisted releasing the tape which would have exonerated their own officer, however, and only did so in response to a FOIA request from the newspaper. Apparently, power has some privileges after all.
*In case you were wondering, the assemblyman is a Democrat. But that’s no surprise. This phenomenon isn’t partisan, by any means.
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