There simply are No "Good" Cops Anymore

[Just for the sake of clarity I'm not talking about "all" cops. Or the Cop who helps an old lady with her groceries, or gets the cat out of the tree, or is kind to his dog - that's the easy stuff. I'm talking about the ones who have the integrity to be "Good" enough to do the right thing, even when it's incredibly hard, even when they have to go up against other cops! When he - or she's - got some real skin in the game and might suffer personal career consequences for it not just from his fellow officers, but retribution from his superiors. Yes, we have had some of those - like Frank Serpico and others - but not damn near enough. Not hardly. We need that to be the norm, not the rarity. Anyway - on with the rant!]

It's time to give up on the myth. The delusion has been revealed. It's not just about the choke and compression homicide of Eric Garner. It's not just that Police Departments and DAs who will cover for them with Reverse Kangaroo Grand Juries, who will abuse their authority to seek retribution against those who criticize or reveal incorrect police policies such as Daniele Watts [Charged with "Lewd Conduct" after complaining about being wrongfully required to provide ID and detained] and Ramsey Orta [The person who filmed Eric Garner's arrest] who has been indicted on gun charges. Now we have the news that "No Charges" will be filled against the Officers who killed Darrien Hunt in Utah, even after they fired Six Shots Into His Back. Police argued they had to shoot Hunt because he brandished a sword and "lunged at them", but people can't lunge backwards and the sword in question was a decorative item that was unsharpened with a blunt edge so it makes no sense for him to lunge at anyone with it. And yet the Prosecutors continue to talk as if somehow Hunt was "dangerous" and police were justified in shooting him while he was running away from them.

"This happened so quickly, violently and without provocation the officers had to use what was most immediately available to them, which was their firearms," Buhman said, according to AP. Buhman added that the two officers will not be charged in Hunt's death. "It would have been a matter of seconds before he could have reached someone else," Buhman said, according to AP.

It's also very likely that Hunt pulled the scabbard off the sword to show them it's wasn't sharp, rather than attack them with it - because he had no reason to attack and doing so would have been just plain stupid. Looking forward we have the cases of Jonathon Crawford and Tamir Rice both shot down by Police within just seconds while holding toy guns which - like so many of these others - will probably be deemed "justified", yet again. People like Bill O'Reilly and Rudy Giuliani and Peter King keep telling us this kind of thing wouldn't happen to so many Black Men if the "Good Black People" would do something about the Bad Black people that would supposedly make All Black people less terrifying to Cops.

But why can't we apply that same standard to Police?

I used to wonder, where are the supposedly "Good Cops" who oppose the idea that it's perfectly reasonable to take a minor situation like jaywalking, playing with a toy in public or a tax infraction and turn them into a life and death struggle? Now I realize, there aren't any of those Cops anymore. Those whose first inclination when challenged isn't to grab their baton, their pepper spray, their taser or their gun - rather than seek ways to resolve the conflict with brains rather than brawn. Because if there are any of those Cops around, I don't see them. And I don't see any of them speaking out and taking a stand against all this Death that continues to pile body on top of body in Black and also White communities. I don't see them standing up to uphold the law against those who would break that law right in front of them, simply because the people doing that - are other Cops.

As Ferguson unfolded with Michael Brown and now with the Eric Garner non-decision to indict we've had plenty of chances to see what Real Cops - the "Good Ones" - via PoliceOne.com [a site that only allows verified Police Officers to Post] think about these situations.

Posted by SURVIVAL on Thursday, December 04, 2014 01:21 AM Pacific Report Abuse What choke hold? You mean the attempted "Carotid Restraint Hold" that lasted for several seconds on "Fatso" the walking heart attack? He killed himself by getting so worked up over refusing to follow simple and lawful commands. Shame on NYPD for prohibiting such an effective control hold in the first place. The carotid has saved many of my arrestees and me further injury plenty of times. To the criminals in protest,don't break the law and do what the authorities tell you to do. Statutorily or Biblically, it's all there in black and white print..."Do what is right and obey the peace keepers

Posted by slim1899 on Thursday, December 04, 2014 06:26 AM Pacific Report Abuse If you can talk you can breathe. Lets stop making excuses for criminal behavior because they are black. This guy would have died going up a flight of stairs. His diet killed him. The real victims are these poor Officers who's lives are destroyed because everyone is too afraid to speak the truth. These were bad guys, doing bad things. No one cares what color they were except the racist liberals.

Posted by Muckers35 on Thursday, December 04, 2014 03:31 AM Pacific Report Abuse It's going to be a long 19 years to retirement...we can only pray that we never have to do the RIGHT thing and still be thrown under the bus like we are the thugs...society is backwards..be careful brothers and my prayers are with you all...

Posted by SAPDMAS on Wednesday, December 03, 2014 08:27 PM Pacific Report Abuse People are sick and tired of thugs. Certain people better wake the hell up and stop supporting the thugs. 2 years 1 month before the head thug gets thrown out and hopefully a real POTUS gets elected.

So it's not really like you can expect any of those guys to stand up and say "Hey, wait a minute - let's all calm down now. Maybe we don't need to get physical with this guy when all we need is his signature on an ticket?" I'm thinking not bloody likely. Where were the "Good Cops" when we met Officer Go-Fuck-Yourself?

Yes, I understand that this Officer has since resigned, and that at the time there was one Officer who told him to stop pointing his weapon at people who had their hands up, but clearly this wasn't his first rodeo with the F-Word threatening people who weren't threatening him. This couldn't have been the first time he'd behaved like this - it was only the first time he been caught on camera doing it. Why hadn't someone tried to stop him previously? Where were the "Good Cops" while this guy was getting used to the idea of being an abusive dick? Or here, where's the "Good Cop" in this sequence during the early days of Occupy, is he hiding somewhere like Waldo in the crowd?

Which one of these guys was the "Good Cop" when Officer Pepper Spray decided to go to town in Davis, CA?

Where was the "Good Guy" Cop when this happened?

Or when this happened in Florida.

Or here with where Chris Lollie is assaulted and tased by Police for not showing ID in Minnesota, which isn't a "Papers Please" State, because he was "Sitting Suspiciously".
Where was this magical Officer Friendly who would put these situations in perspective and rather than immediately escalate them with demands for compliance and use of force, actually try to show the Tax Paying Constituent A Tiny Bit of Respect? I've watched all these videos, repeatedly, and except for one guy who tells Officer Go-Fuck-Yourself to knock it off - That Guy is Absent. That guy - or girl - is missing. A.W.O.L. Nobody is there to defend these citizens, except other citizens, when in many states - like New York - it's illegal to offer any resistance to arrest, even if that arrest is unlawful. The Officer who grabbed Eric Garner by the neck, using a technique that has been banned by the NYPD for 20 years also happens to have two prior cases of excessive force and abuse against him one of which paid out a settlement for $30,000 because he had apparently forced stripped search two black men and touched their genitals in public.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- One of the two civil rights lawsuits against Daniel Pantaleo, the NYPD officer who put Eric Garner in a chokehold Thursday, ended up costing taxpayers $30,000 in settlement money, according to the plaintiffs' attorney. The suit, which was settled in January, accuses Pantaleo and another officer of strip-searching two men on a New Brighton street, pulling down their pants and underwear in broad daylight, in March 2012. It alleges that Pantaleo and several other officers -- Joseph Torres, Ignazio Conca, and Steven Lopez -- "unlawfully stopped" a vehicle on Jersey Street in New Brighton. Another officer, Christian Cataldo, arrived at the scene later.

So where was the "Good Cop" to put a stop to this before it got out of hand? Pantaleo wasn't alone when all this went down there were at least 3-4 other Officers there. Exactly why didn't they do something about it? And that's just one of the cases pending against him - there's another one. When Pantaleo decided to grab Eric Garner by the neck, using a technique that has been known to induce death as it did with Anthony Baez in New York and in the Police choke-hold murder cover-up of Ron Settles decades ago in Signal Hill, CA - where exactly was the "Good Cop" to pull him off of Garner? I didn't see that guy, did you? The bottom line is that Pantaleo isn't a truly dangerous problem, not by himself. He's like a pimple, a pollup, it's the rest of the Department that is slowly metastasizing into a full blown Cancer that's the problem if they can't recognize and snip problem people like Pantaleo out earlier. Or even worse, if it's the macho-man cop culture that produces a Pantaleo in the first place, then cultivates him until he turns into something ugly and deadly, smirking and waving at the Camera after he's just helped commit a homicide.

All I saw was five other Cops Pile Onto Garner, ultimately compressing his chest, restricting his breathing and finishing the Murder that Pantaleo had only jump started. Cops who then casually stand around as he lays on the ground unconscious, uncaring, and barely interested as he slowly dies right in front of them. The man is Unconscious and the EMS shows up and tries to talk to him like he's napping or something. He's dying. He died in the ambulance. Christopher Dorner tried to be "Good Cop" and although he clearly had emotion and other issues that drove him far beyond the pale, he was ultimately correct when he complained that his partner had abused a helpless, handcuffed mentally challenged man by kicking him in the face. That man, haltingly, testified under oath at Dorner's dismissal hearing and confirmed his claims.

Dorner was ultimately fired for "Lying" when he filed his complaint against an abusive supervisory Officer, apparently because he didn't do it quickly enough and she had given him a poor performance rating, never mind the fact that both the victim [as shown above] and his father confirmed Dorner's claims. Ultimately he failed to be re-instated, and this set him off onto an unfortunate murderous killing spree. Certainly his murders are on him and there's no excuse for it. None. But if that man was a powder keg ready to explode, LAPD's attitude toward those who come forward to report abuse lit an entire book of matches around him. It was like waving red flags before a raging bull in a tea cup china shop. Shit was bound to get fucked up. Over a decade ago some other Officers, like Dorner, did try to stand up. They filed a Class Action Lawsuit against LAPD for their crackdown on whistle-blowers.

More than 60 current and former officers are joining a class-action lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department that alleges retaliation against whistle-blowers, bringing the total number of plaintiffs to more than 100, an attorney said Monday. The original lawsuit, filed Aug. 24 in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of 41 former and current employees, most of them officers, claims that the LAPD has a culture that enforces a "code of silence" that leads to a pattern of discrimination, harassment and retaliation against those who report misconduct by other officers.

One of the plaintiffs, a narcotics detective named Shelby Braverman, worked in the same Harbor Division that Dorner served in. Braverman reported on one of his supervisors stealing heroin from evidence — and found himself the subject of a reopened criminal case. The result was that Braverman was fired and jailed for 30 days, ending his 20-year career. Another plaintiff, Lita Abella, was driven out of the force and psychologically damaged by her experience: For so many LAPD officers and employees, their problems only worsen when officers report police misconduct — which is how Dorner’s problems started. In 2011, two years after Dorner was fired for allegedly lying when he filed a police misconduct report against a fellow officer, the LA Times wrote about the LAPD’s Inspector General’s investigation into the very same problem:

Those Officers, back then, in October of 2000, were Good Cops even if only years after the fact. It's not the case that "One Good Brave Cop" came forward to break the Rampart Scandal. No, that story exploded because one officer got caught stealing drugs out of evidence so his girlfriend could sell it on the street for extra cash. In the meanwhile White Cops had been shooting Black Cops thinking they were "Gang-Bangers" and covering it up.

Undercover L.A.P.D. officer Frank Lyga shot and killed off-duty L.A.P.D. officer Kevin Gaines in a case of apparent road rage. The shooting of a black officer -- Gaines -- by a white cop -- Lyga -- created a highly publicized police controversy. Lyga told FRONTLINE that Gaines threatened him with a gun and that he responded in self-defense, adding, "In my training experience this guy had 'I'm a gang member' written all over him." Investigators on the case discovered that Gaines had allegedly been involved in similar road rage incidents, threatening drivers and brandishing his gun. They also discovered troubling connections between Gaines and Death Row Records, a rap recording label owned by Marion "Suge" Knight that, investigators came to find, was hiring off-duty police officers as security guards. ... Officials in the L.A.P.D. property room discovered that six pounds of cocaine evidence are missing. Within a week, detectives focused their investigation on L.A.P.D. officer Rafael Perez, a member of the Rampart CRASH unit. ... Concerned about a possible clique of officers involved in criminal misconduct -- working off-duty for Death Row Records, robbing banks and stealing cocaine -- L.A.P.D. Chief Bernard Parks established an internal investigative task force. The investigative team, later named the Rampart Corruption Task Force, focused primarily on the prosecution of Rafael Perez. Further audit of the L.A.P.D. property room identified another pound of missing cocaine -- evidence that had been booked on a prior arrest made by Det. Frank Lyga, the officer who had shot Kevin Gaines. At the time, investigators speculated that Perez may have stolen the cocaine booked by Lyga in retaliation for the shooting of Gaines.

Yeah, I'm not really seeing a "Good Cop" in that scenario anywhere, not until the Cocaine went missing. Going back even further there was actually a somewhat Cheesy Movie in the 90's that perfectly explains why there aren't that many Good Cops anymore - because the Bad Ones Run Things.

Silly though that film may seem, it was based on the True Story of a rookie L.A. Sherrif's Deputy.

"The Glass Shield" was inspired by a true story, but one suspects that drama overtook its sense of realism. It doesn't matter. It's good drama -- a taut morality tale of police corruption and an engrossing mystery, too.

In the film the brave rookie is shown being intimidated, threatened and stalked by other members of his station who are more intent on getting the "collar and conviction" than the truth. Attempts are made on his life, until finally after doing the right thing he's driven out of the department. But unlike back then real life these days continues to eclipse even well crafted drama when it comes to long standing patterns of intimidation and abuse in the L.A. Sherrif's Department decades after "The Glass Shield" was even conceived. That was 1994, this is 2013.

LOS ANGELES -- Eighteen current and former members of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department were indicted for crimes including unjustified beatings of jail inmates and visitors, unjustified detentions and a conspiracy to obstruct a federal investigation. The charges are the result of a two-year investigation and involve conduct by deputies assigned to both Men's Central Jail and Twin Towers Correctional Facility. "This investigation started by focusing on misconduct in county jails, and we uncovered examples of civil rights violations that included excessive force and unlawful arrests," said United States Attorney Andr? Birotte Jr. "Some members of the sheriff's department considered themselves to be above the law." Sixteen defendants have already been arrested, and most were arrested at various sheriff's department facilities, officials said. Three defendants no longer working for the sheriff's department were arrested at their residence without incident. Two defendants will be arrested at a later time but are not considered fugitives.

It took undercover members of the FBI and their informants to bring this scandal to light because not a single member of the entire L.A. Sherrifs Department had the courage to reveal what was at that time a pretty rampant pattern of - well, let's call it what it was - Criminal Activity by sworn Officers of the Law. If there are "Good Cops" still out there NOW, who are truly willing to stop the lawlessness, to stop the violence, to stop the abuse, to stand up and tell the truth regardless of their own personal or professional consequences for doing that... I don't see them. And I don't see them anymore because they aren't there. They know, even if the "Glass Shield" story is somewhat fictionalized, it's essentially true at it's core, and that if they take a stand they're going to wind up without a career. Or worse, they're going to wind up like Chris Dorner. Bill O'Reilly says that people who stand by in a protest as it turns violent and don't either try to stop it or leave are complicit, aiding and abetting in that violence. Why exactly doesn't that rule go double for Cops who let citizens be abused, brutalized and killed unnecessarily while they simply let it happen?

Why?

Because THEY'RE COWARDS. And cowards aren't Good Guys, they're just the guys who meekly help the Bad Guys get away with it by Standing By and Doing Nothing. If they weren't the enablers for a rabid pack of gun-toting thugs, they'd stand up and be counted. They'd stand with and for the American People, not just with their so-called "brothers" in Blue. If there were truly "Good Cops" out there, they'd be using their off duty time to March Side by Side with the Protestors for Eric Garner, for Michael Brown, for Tamir Rice, for Darrien Hunt, for Jonathan Crawford, for Bryce Masters, for Oscar Grant, for Amador Diallo, for Patrick Dorismond, and Ron Settles, and Eula Love, and Jonny Gammage, and Leonard Deadwyler way back in 1966, as well as the tens of thousands of unwarranted killings that happened in between. They'd agree that one unnecessary and avoidable assault or death under color of authority is Too Damn Many.

The idea that Cops have a right to use all types of unnecessary force just to gain compliance outside of reasonable proportion to the offense or threat posed, needs to Stop or the bodies are going to just keep falling. "Good Cops" would've come forward and spoke out about the brutality of LAPD's S.I.S. "Death Squad" before they'd killed 36 people. They'd stop making excuses, and blaming the victims, for why every other Democratic and industrialized nation has police killings in the single digits and we have them by the hundreds every year. They'd be stripping off their badges, taking off their guns and locking arms with them in solidarity against unnecessary police violence and abuse. But noooo..... They aren't doing that, now are they? Didn't think so. Because all the "Good Ones" are long gone. And If I'm wrong about that, I'd sure be glad to see someone - on the job - stand up and prove it every once in a while. Vyan

Sat Dec 06, 2014 at 12:50 AM PT: Speak of the Devil, or rather Angel in this case, Frank Serpico speaks

Was I surprised by the Staten Island grand jury? Of course not. When was the last time a police officer was indicted?

This is the use of excessive force for no apparent reason on a guy who is selling loosie cigarettes; what is the threat to your well-being? If a police officer's life is in danger, he has every right to use every force in his means to defend himself.

In the old days, they used to put a gun or a knife on somebody after a shooting. Now they don't even bother.

But today, we have cops crying wolf all the time. They testify "I was in fear of my life," the grand jury buys it, the DA winks and nods, and there's no indictment.