The video was posted on January 6, 2013. A brief article in the New York Post explained:
The police chief in Connecticut's largest city has pulled three officers off the streets after a video was posted online showing them kicking and stomping on a man they had already subdued with a stun gun.In the video, a stun gun is heard being fired and a man falls to the ground at a park. Two officers stand over the motionless man and begin kicking him. A third officer drives up and attacks him. No complaint was filed.
Bridgeport city spokeswoman Elaine Ficarra said today that all three officers are on desk duty while authorities investigate the May 2011 encounter. Elson Morales, Joseph Lawlor and Clive Higgins are 10-year veterans of the police force.
Nearly two years had passed since the cops stomped the downed perp. But then, it never happened until there was video. GW Lawprof Jonathan Turley asks why:
Even though courts have consistently ruled that such filming is protected by the Constitution, police and prosecutors continue to charge and prosecute citizens who take such videos — or detain and harass them when spotted. This occurs because of a failure to discipline officers harassing or arresting citizens in such circumstances.
In this case, it is not clear why, once again, YouTube appears the decisive factor. Presumably, none of the officers revealed what had occurred or there would have been some action taken before the YouTube posting.
There remains a huge divergence between what people want to believe about policing on the street and the reality of the streets. It's surprising to find Turley, as a regular in noting police misconduct, asking the question of why a video "appears to be the decisive factor." His presumption, that none of the officers "revealed" that they tap-danced on their perp, is also surprising.
If I had to guess, the officers most likely did "reveal" what happened, in a way. After they booked their victim, they laughingly told a group of fellow officers how they gave him a "tune up," or some other police euphemism. The group chuckled knowingly, and then moved on with their day. There was no concern that anyone would raise an objection or mention it again. All in a day's work.
Why? Sometimes it's because the guy made an out-of-shape, over-weight officer run, or walk fast, rather than conducted himself in the manner most convenient to police officers. Such insolence. The officer got sweaty, or scuffed his shoe. He was breathing hard and could have had a heart attack. A cop can't let a perp get away with that, so he has to give a lesson in who's the boss. With his shoe. Because he can.
One might think that a defendant appearing at arraignment with bruises on his back and maybe a broken bone would be a giveaway to someone, a prosecutor or a judge, that improper force was used. But this is easily addressed, with a line or two in the write-up about how the perp aggressively resisted arrest and force was used to subdue him. Easy.
When the defense attorney tells the judge about how the defendant was lying on the ground, having submitted to the arrest and being compliant, an officer came to stomp him, the judge listens quietly and offers some noncommittal response. The judge is thinking, "what does he want me to do?"
There is no magic way to distinguish who is telling the truth and who is lying through his teeth. There never has been. On the one side, you have the police officer, who at some point saved a kitty in a tree and became a hero, and on the other side some perp with a sheet who never got a medal for saving a kitty. Go with the odds, and the odds have always favored the police.
What makes a video the decisive factor? Short of a dozen witnesses wearing clerical garb, and even then it's doubtful, video does the one thing that the defense side, where perps are human beings and not statistics or miscreants to be stomped for fun, has historically never been able to do. Prove it.
Some might get the impression, based upon the number of instances of police misconduct that now come to light because of the decisive factor of video that police used to be kinder and gentler, but have suddenly turned more violent and vicious. After all, sustained determinations of police misconduct involving the use of excessive force were negligible, essentially non-existent, before the pervasive use of video. Suddenly, they are everywhere.
It's like magic. It's called proof, and it's what never existed before when defendants' complaints were simply ignored because the odds were against them.
Given the frequency with which videos have revealed that the police were less than forthright, both in their allegations of criminal conduct and their explanations for violence, one would think that the equation should have shifted. One would think that judges would no longer give the cops the automatic benefit of the doubt, and might take the complaints more seriously and, at the very least, scrutinize the details to determine whether the facts truly support the facile police allegations.
But if a guy who is as familiar with the problems as Turley still asks why the video should be the deciding factor, despite the many videos he's put up on his own blog, it appears that we are still a very long way from overcoming the presumption that cops tell the truth and cop never use excessive force. Never, that is, until a video proves otherwise.
© 2012 Simple Justice NY LLC. This feed is for personal, non-commercial & Newstex use only. The use of this feed on any other website is a copyright violation. If this feed is not via RSS reader or Newstex, it infringes the copyright.
Source: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2013/01/28/but-for-video-the-bridgeport-epiphany.aspx?ref=rss
No comments:
Post a Comment