A Good Cop
by digby
Josh Marshall at TPM has a cop reader who writes in from time to time. This came in response to the brownshirt rally in Long Island yesterday:
I’m fucking furious.
This two-bit gangster, would-be dictator just set police-community relations back by a quarter of a century.
“When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over,” he mimicked an officer putting a handcuffed person in the back of a squad car, the officer’s hand over the suspect’s head. “Like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody? Don’t hit their head?”
“I said, you can take the hand away, OK?” he concluded, to laughter, and then loud applause.”
The reaction of officers in the room to the President’s words as described is troubling and embarrassing. Any officer who causes injury to a person in custody is open internal disciplinary charges, criminal Assault charges, Official Misconduct, and Federal civil rights violations, as well as civil liability. This is NOT the Wild West, as POTUS seems to imagine.
Police Officers are not judge and jury. We do not meet out punishment. Every person has the constitutional right to a presumption of innocence. We are authorized to use minimum force necessary to take a person into custody. Once in custody, police are responsible for the health and well-being of the arrestee.
I would direct the POTUS to the definition of the word “custody”
I get that a lot of people in this country really think they want the cops to bring the hammer down on all the “bad people.” You know, the ones who aren’t white. Aside from the un-American immorality of such a point of view, they should realize that once you let this genie out of the bottle anyone can become the target.
I know an older white man who spent his life raging about racial minorities and extolling police brutality who got stopped by a cop after he’d been drinking and he said something rude, got tasered, wrestled to the ground and his nose was broken. He didn’t think that was fair at all. In fact, he was very angry that it happened to him. He felt his rights had been trampled. Imagine that.
Had he been black he very easily could have been shot, of course. They deal with this in a whole different lethal dimension. But even white people who believe that the police see them as good guys are subject to police brutality. Once you say it’s ok, they figure they can do whatever they want whenever they want and even old white men don’t have any constitutional rights.
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