I’ll be filing this one under “Boo Freaking Hoo.” As Daily Kos readers are aware, the August 2014 murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, touched off days of protests in the area. The response to those protests was heavily militarized and over-the-top. During one protest, St. Ann (Missouri) Police Lieutenant Ray Albers was seen walking with/through the crowd with his automatic rifle “raised and pointed” at protestors. He tells a group of media workers present in the crowd, “I will f------ kill you!” When the person recording him asks Albers his name, Albers’ reply is “Go f--- yourself. Check the video below.
Albers was suspended about a week or so after the video went viral and he eventually resigned from the police department. That should have been the end of it. Now, the Huffington Post reports Albers wants his job in policing back.
Albers resigned but was allowed to keep his license that allows him to be a police officer. On December 16, Missouri’s Administrative Hearing Commission met to decide if they would suspend or permanently revoke Albers license. That’s when the violins started playing: Albers says his life has been ruined since the Ferguson protests.
Wait … it gets worse. This is what Albers’s lawyer had to say:
“Albers and his lawyer, Brandi Barth, offered several different defenses for his actions that night. Barth argued it was “unfair” to make Albers “the poster child” for bad policing during the Ferguson protests, and showed off photos of a number of other officers pointing rifles at protesters. Indeed, St. Louis County officers stationed on top of armored vehicles even pointed their sniper rifles at crowds of peaceful protesters in broad daylight a few days after Brown’s death, a tactic that drew widespread condemnation.
“There’s selective enforcement against Mr. Albers, in a situation where we have now seen at least a dozen officers in the selected photos having their rifles raised,” Barth said. “This situation of 30 seconds in a 20-year career has literally ruined his life.””
In other words, “a whole lot of cops were doing the same exact thing that night, so don’t just punish me!” I actually agree with Albers on this point, however. ALL of those cops should have been shown the door. Every. Last. One. Of. Them.
And last but not least, here’s the best part. I mean worst:
“Video footage from the night in question clearly shows Albers pointing his rifle at people who were recording police activity. He can be seen advancing in their direction as they stood on the sidewalk. But Albers claimed that he was “approached by a mob of people” and that he only raised his weapon because he saw a black male with a handgun. He says he was hit by a bottle filled with urine a few minutes before the incident, and that when he raised his weapon, he had it trained on the man with a gun he'd spotted.”
“I seen about a half a dozen black males come out of the east side of Sam’s Meat Market. They all had bandanas wrapped around their face, like an outlaw-type bandana,” Albers testified. “Two of them at least [who] came out had Molotov cocktails. The other one had a handgun... ready to go."
“However, in each of the three videos played during the hearing, Albers can be seen pointing his gun toward various people in the crowd. At no point does he appear to be pursuing the supposed "man with a gun" he describes -- in fact, no such man can be seen in the videos. Albers was also a long distance away from Sam’s Meat Market at the point when he claims to have seen individuals carrying Molotov cocktails and a handgun.”
Boo freakin hoo. Cry me a river. Go ‘head with that nonsense, man. Go ‘head somewhere where you don’t have access to guns and have to work with people.
Buh-bye.