4631 Good Cop, Bad Cop, Worse Cop
A lineup of 1980s NY Police cars. Car #1, please roll forward.
The “good cop” tries to befriend his
suspect. The bad cop loses his temper, then rants and raves
threateningly. It’s a tactic as old as policing. The worse cop is
an inventive entrepreneur. He or she finds new and marketable uses for common
household items. Like phone books, broomsticks and handguns that suddenly
materialize out of thin air at crime scenes. Other worsies are absent
minded. They lose track of evidence. Or they stumble over seized drugs to
sell back to their source.
When this happens, the public complains.
And until now, their complaints often got lost along with some paperwork.
Yes, until now. The New York State Legislature recently repealed the law
that kept the complaints secret. And the NYPD, essentially a law abiding
group of men and women, complied with the change by releasing nearly 400,000
records going back to 1985.
You want to read ‘em? Click here and wait patiently. It takes forever to load
and your internet connection may time out.
The gross total is misleading. There
weren’t 400,000 officers about whom people complained. There was a group
of a mere 80-thousand recipients. That’s a lot of bad apples in a
lot of barrels.
Assume that a good percentage of complaints were
unfounded. Say half. That’s still 200,000 complaints against more
than 40-thousand officers. And not every complaint led to punishment, fines or
the loss of a job.
Still a lot of bad apples in a lot of barrels.
Although it may not seem so at this point, this
site is not anti-cop. It’s a life-on-the-line-every-day existence. And
the overwhelming majority of officers follow procedure and worry. As do
their spouses, their children, their parents, their friends and every other
cop.
Police deserve endless credit. Except for
the bad apples. The real ones. The ones with broom handles and phone books and
traces of meth on their hands, or who keep shiny new Corvettes carefully
covered at their houses upstate.
It’s time to clean up this rot. But it also is
time for complaint filers to think twice before they wrongly and falsely accuse
an officer of an imaginary crime.
NOTES FROM ALL OVER:
(Long Island Sound) -- Steve Bannon and three
other men, one a triple amputee who served in a war zone, were arrested and
charged with siphoning big money from a “build the wall” fundraising
effort. Bannon was aboard a yacht at the time of his arrest. Did he
really say “What yacht?”
(NEW YORK) -- All four of the men denied they
conned the money from supporters of the con man-in-chief. The “president” first
said he didn’t know about the scam but later added he hadn’t dealt with Bannon
for a long time and (always?) thought the fundraising effort was “showboating.”
(WASHINGTON) -- More than one million people
newly signed up for unemployment comp in the week ended Thursday, August
20th.
(TOMSK, RUSSIA) -- Putin’s main foe, Aleksei
Navalny grabbed a morning tea at the airport, downed it, boarded the plane.
Halfway through the flight to Moscow, he passed out. At latest report he
was hospitalized and unconscious in a hospital. Poisoned? Impossible.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but
you’re welcome to them. ®
Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2020\
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