Men with guns
by digby
I don’t know what’s wrong with this police officer but something is. This is completely unprofessional.
The footage began with an apparent conversation between the two men and then showed MacLeod’s reaction when Valdes told him “God bless you.” MacLeod, who seemed to be letting Valdes go with a ticket, came back up to the motorcyclist and got in his face as he shouted.
“You want to be a sarcastic bitch? I’ll be fucking a bigger bitch,” MacLeod said. “You’re fucking with the wrong dude, bro. I’ve been here longer than you’ve fucking been alive. I’ve put up with more shit that you can ever think of. So if you want to test me again, you’ll be finding Dade County Jail real fucking hunky dory tonight.”
In the video, Valdes told MacLeod he just wanted to go to work.
“Then don’t be a fucking little wise-ass 20-year-old punk,” MacLeod said.
A decent cop would have ignored the comment. Or maybe said “thank you”. Or even rolled his eyes. But losing his cool over that? That’s a bad cop. He should not be on the street.
On the other hand, my husband was topped the other day for rolling through a stop sign. The cop was amazingly professional, very cool, all business even let us off with a warning saying that he knew my husband wasn’t “going to do it again … right?” (He was Santa Monica PD.) This was in stark contrast to an LAPD stop I had a couple of years ago when the officer was abusive towards me, yelling and screaming because my tail light wasn’t working. You just never know …
The job has tons of benefits and they deserve all of them. Cops are just people and they have a very stressful job. But when they get like this they need to be relieved of duty. It’s that simple. You can’t have people in authority with weapons who have a short fuse like that.
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