Friday, August 21, 2020

#4631 Good Cop, Bad Cop, Worse Cop



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  The New York State Legislature recently repealed the law that kept the complaints secret.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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4759 The Supreme Court

  C’mon, guys, we all know what you’re doing.  You’re hiding behind nonsense so a black woman is not the next Associate Justice of the  U.S....