1) The Tamir Rice Settlement
Tamir Rice was the 12-year-old boy playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland, Ohio park, who was fatally shot about two seconds after a police officer exited his vehicle. Commenting on the $6 million settlement with the Rice family, the Cleveland police union said: "We only hope the Rice family and their attorneys will use a portion of this settlement to help educate the youth of Cleveland in the dangers associated with the mishandling of both real and facsimile firearms." A Twitter post interpreted the statement as: "I hope you use the settlement from us shooting your son dead to teach kids how not to get shot dead."
Stephen S. Loomis, the president of the police union, threatened to tell his officers not to work security at Cleveland Browns' games unless running back, Isaiah Crowell, takes down his social media post depicting the death of a police officer. Crowell had already apologized to Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams by phone. He had also posted a written apology on Instagram and quickly deleted it.
Loomis had blasted a group of community leaders' plans to bypass prosecutors and seek changes in how to respond to the shooting death. The clueless union chief said: "It is very sad how miserable the lives of these self-appointed activists, civil rights leaders, and clergy must be." "I can't imagine being so very consumed with anger and hatred."
2) Police Sex Scandal
This past month, seven former and current Bay Area (San Francisco) law enforcement officers were charged with criminal behavior in connection with allegations that the officers had sex with a teenager. The 19-year-old has said she had sex with more than a dozen Oakland police officers and a total of about 30 instances of sexual activity with other police agency officers. Some of these acts occurred when she was still underage. Oakland's mayor said four officers would be fired and seven suspended without pay.
3) The "Thick Blue Line" Resists Reform
Despite outcries and urgent calls for reform of police use of excessive force against minorities, police unions have resisted attempts to change the status quo, attacking their critics as enablers of crime. A study of collective bargaining by big-city police unions, published this past summer by the reform group, Campaign Zero, found that agreements routinely guarantee that officers aren't interrogated immediately after use-of-force incidents and often insure that disciplinary records are purged after three to five years. Samuel Walker, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, has found "a culture of impunity." "For the past fifty years, police unions have done their best to block policing reforms of all kinds." "And though conservatives regularly castigate public-service unions as parasites, they typically exempt the police." [1]
4) Police Fabricating Charges
Michael Picard was videotaping the police when one trooper illegally seized his phone. A Connecticut trooper, not knowing the phone was still recording, begin shouting: "Let's give him something!" Another trooper suggested: "We can hit him with creating a public disturbance." "Gotta cover our ass,"said a third.
5) Police Suicides
The National Police Suicide Foundation puts police officer suicides in the 400-a-year range, which would mean a rate of 53 suicides per 100,000 officers. Another advocacy group, the Badge of Life organization, puts the rate at 14 to 17 suicides per 100,000. The rate among the general population is 11 per 100,000, according to the Badge of Life. The 141 suicides verified for 2008 by the Badge of Life, were almost three times the number of officers killed by felons. [2]
According to Robert Douglas, executive director of the National Police Suicide Foundation, "The number one reason why officers commit suicide is a breakdown of the family unit, and part of that is the extramarital affair." Douglas added that the police training academies do not teach communication skills in relation to families. The suicide numbers might be higher, because there are no uniform reporting standards and police departments often try to hide or cover up officer suicides; furthermore, of the 18,000 police agencies in the United States, less than three percent of those agencies have police suicide awareness programs.
ADDENDUMS:
*North Carolina's House Bill 972 restricts the disclosure of police dash/body camera video and audio to the public (including the families of those affected) without a court order.
* In the fatal choking case of Eric Garner in New York City, the only one charged with a crime was the videographer.
*Duke Energy maintains that the ash produced in its manufacturing process is no more toxic than rocks and dirt, which also contain heavy metals. North Carolina's environmentalists disagree: "The metals have been concentrated in the ash and can pose serious health problems when they contaminate drinking water sources." Sam Perkins, Catawba Riverkeeper, says that contaminated groundwater has been found at each of 33 sites. [3]
*"During the Civil War, more than a quarter of a million Southern men died, creating the phenomenon of a vast number of female-headed households throughout the region. Mass incarceration during the War on Drugs has produced a similar phenomenon among African-American households." [4]
Footnotes
[1] James Surwiecki, "The Thick Blue Line," The New Yorker, September 19, 2016.
[2] Dennis Domrzaliki, "APD's Sexcapades Taking Their Toll," ABQ Free Press, September 7-20, 2016.
[3] Tristram Korten, "State of Denial," Sierra, September/October 2016.
[4] Jelani Cobb, "The Home Front," The New Yorker, August 29, 2016.
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