The mis-ID was understandable–very close resemblance by any std–closely matched pix which was not some generic description. BUT no need for such force in CC fraud arrest. Cop should be fired.
Why? What is the reason for slamming the true suspect to the ground? This act was a criminal battery and anything less than a criminal prosecution is a farce. This officer shouldn’t just lose his job, but his freedom.
@ClassicRockerDad Um, yeah, well, you see… in order to allow officers to be effective at the jobs they have to do, we give them more latitude than the average person has, so it’s very doubtful that this meets the bar for “criminal battery”.
It should meet the bar for unacceptable workplace activity though.
I expressed myself poorly. You were right to point that out.
Why is this man still a police officer?
http://nypost.com/2015/09/11/cop-accused-of-body-slamming-james-blake-needed-to-go-a-long-time-ago/
@justonedad:
The cop in question could be charged with a lot more than simply being fired for improper conduct, if it is found that he totally disregarded procedure, if for example he used force when it wasn’t called for, or if he used excessive force, he could be charged with criminal assault. If a cop kills someone and it is found to be unjustified, they can be charged with murder. Yes, cops are given leeway you and I wouldn’t be, but there is still a standard there, and in this case I don’t care what that snotty asshole of a commissioner says, I doubt many juries would find any reason for this. The cop in question is a lot bigger than Blake, and the video shows that he just ran over and threw him to the ground, with zero provocation, and other than maybe some town in the back of a bog, I doubt many Juries would find for the cop.
What this highlights is the mentality of far too many cops, that in doing their job they have the right to do what they want, that that latitude turns into “stomp out the scum”, and sadly they often have gotten away with it. In this case, the videotape leaves little the imagination (despite what Bratton said), but let’s say this had happened when there was no video? The cop would be saying that Blake resisted him, attacked him, and he was justified, and the NY Post and the rest of the the law and order types would be calling Blake scum, etc.
The irony is that I generally try to give cops the benefit of the doubt, I know the reality of their jobs, and I know what can happen, lived in some pretty dicey areas, and I have seen the kinds of things cops face, but when I see stuff like this it makes me wonder about what I generally think about cops. Sadly, fellow cops have the ‘thin blue line’ then wonder why they aren’t necessarily trusted by the people they are supposed to protect.
Probably for the same reason that a lot of people still have jobs despite being mediocre employees. I’m all for raising the bar for law enforcement personnel, but that would mean the doors would be closed to a lot of people that you might want to give this sort of opportunity to.
And did I mention the additional taxes to pay higher salaries?
IF.
IF this is procedure they cannot fix it fast enough
Have you ever been responsible for writing an important procedure or training course that lots of people will have to follow?
@JustoneDad By the way, re: post #2 (“as long as blacks have a much higher arrest and incarceration rate, the problem will not go away”), what do you think about the article ucbalumnus linked in post #20? At least part of the reason for that disproportionate number of black arrests-convictions-incarcerations is racial profiling by cops and juries. You seem to imply here that it is mostly imcumbent upon blacks to change their behavior if they want those numbers to go down. But, Blake did “all the right things” in his life and he was arrested. Were he not so famous, this might have gone further as the cops switched to CYA mode to cover their mistake. Maybe he would’ve been falsely accused of resisting as some have suggested, and been charged and convicted anyway. Maybe. Do you think if tomorrow all African American males in the US behaved themselves and obeyed the law, that there would be no arrests among them?
Hmmmm. Interesting theory. I wonder what part it actually is.
Another interesting theory. I wonder how you would test it.
One thing, for sure, is that you’d have to allow some significant time to pass, like a generation or so in order for the new reality to stop affecting the perceptions of regular people.
The word “thug” is perfect for people like this cop. I hope he’s not only fired but prosecuted.
“One thing, for sure, is that you’d have to allow some significant time to pass, like a generation or so in order for the new reality to stop affecting the perceptions of regular people.” In other words, it’ll never happen.
What elements of criminal battery are missing? What is the bar?
Justonedad- yes I have developed training plans and established procedures. I manage 300 people that can close businesses down for failure to pay taxes. We make sure there are safeguards and a process that protects both the State’s interest and the individuals rights.
Abusive staff are dealt with immediately.
@justonedad:
Well, unless the NYPD took its procedures from Storm Troopers or maybe the NFL guide to sacking a QB, it boggles the mind to think that what we saw on that video is within allowable procedures (actually, in the NFL he these days would likely get a personal foul, if not a game misconduct and suspension, for that kind of hit). This isn’t something new, this is not new territory, this is in light of misconduct going back decades, and yes, the procedures are there. For one thing, it is mind boggling to say if, when the suspect they were looking for was a low level criminal who was NOT accused of violent crimes,that it would be okay to not identify himself as a cop and tell him they want him for questioning. If this was supposed to be a hardened drug dealer with a rap sheet that included things like armed robbery, assault, other kinds of violent crimes, then taking him down first might make sense,but the way this went off on the video? There is no question at all what the cop did, he didn’t identify himself (how do we know? Blake never looks up from his texting, if someone says “Police officer, we need to talk to you” he would have looked up, even if he didn’t know if they wanted him or not), so what was the justification? Put it this way, if this is proper procedure (and if Bratton tries that one, he and Diblasio will have a riot on his hands, not to mention coming off as total morons), then the standards must be out of the Stasi play book, cause otherwise this makes no sense as proper procedure. The cop was not threatened, the ‘suspect’ was not presumed to be armed and dangerous, and the cop was a lot bigger than Blake, so what could be legal about it? Claiming he was armed and dangerous? Claiming the cop was provoked? Not to mention that this cop apparently came from Florida and at least one report said he had complaints there, plus what happened before, doesn’t sound like this is someone you can defend.
Yes, this is going to have to go through proper procedure, I am sure the other cops will testify how in fact he tackled blake,not because of the credit card fraud, but that had the report of a violent crime happening where blake fit the profile (amazing how that happens, especially when a check of the records shows no calls about any such crime anywhere near where they were; there was a similar case to this in NYC, where the cops claimed they had the report of a rapist that matched the suspect they beat up, but when it was researched the rapist being sought was in another boro, was 5’ 6" tall, and the suspect was 6’ + that got beat up), I am sure that the PBA will say the cop was a good cop being made a martyr by politics, but that video to me basically makes any other claim the thin blue line covering up for a bad apple.
As far as blacks committing crimes, @justonedad, I suggest you do some reading on how law enforcement and the criminal justice system works, then you start seeing a pattern. There is no doubt that in inner city areas or heavily african american areas crime tends to be high, but that is also because those areas, for a lot of reasons, tend to be economically depressed, and that breeds crime (just ask small town, mostly white america that suddenly are facing the same issues as the local economy turned to crap, things like drugs and drug dealing, roberry, assault, gang activity, etc). But more importantly, when you look at arrests and sentencing, what you find continuously is different standards for blacks and whites. White kid gets caught with a relatively small amount of dope, they get off with suspended sentence, desk appearance tickets, black kid goes to jail for same thing. Sentences for murder and violent crimes tend to be higher for blacks convicted. When they wrote the drug laws, they made things possession of crack cocaine in relatively small amounts a major felony, where you could have a kilo of powder cocaine and get the same sentence, if not even less. When the Rockefeller drug laws came around, that mandated minimum sentences, often when whites were caught with drugs, the charges were dropped from being felony to misdemeanor to not invoke those laws, whereas with blacks caught with the same amount, they went to jail…if the system is skewed to towards decriminalizing what a white perp does and over does black crimes and penalties, what does that tell you, that maybe the fact that blacks make up a disproportionate place in our jails represents uneven sentencing and enforcement of laws, if a cop sees a group of white kids getting high on pot they may give them a desk ticket, if they see a group of black kids they will often bust them for possession and whatever other charges they can throw at them.
Someone mentioned stop and frisk, the problem with stop and frisk is that the way they were doing it, the probable cause they were using seemed to be being somewhere the cop thought they shouldn’t be with no reason. While I think stop and frisk can be an effective tool, if you look at the yield numbers in NYC, for example, it shows something that should be troubling, that a relatively small percentage of stops yielded things. yes, it found wanted criminals, it took illegal guns off the street, but if you do let’s say 1000 stops and find only 5 busts for anything major (and that is a hypothetical, but the real numbers are pretty shocking), then that is like busting into 1000 houses and saying “I found 5 criminal activities”. The problem is that cops have gotten lazy, beat cops used to know the neightborhood, they knew who the players were, so when they rousted someone they knew who to do, what we have today with (mostly minorities) is broad based tactics then saying “see, look at all the crime”.
Bratten likes to talk about 'intelligent policing", it is what comp stat and the like are supposed to do, but in reality what we often end up with is clowns like the cop in this case, to whom it is guilty until proven innocent, my job is to take out the MF’ers, and often that turns into someone they decide is guilty of heinous crimes and deserves to be treated as such, simply cause of who they are.
I am no bleeding heart liberal when it comes to matters of crime and the cops, I have lived in crappy areas, I did construction in the South Bronx in the late 70’s/early 80’s and saw what cops were up against, and my natural sympathy quite frankly is with the job they are trying to do, but I also have disdain for the cops who take the lazy way out, or who translate the job into being the terror police or something and those who defend that saying "well, ‘they’ deserve it. It is a tough job, i have seen cops surrounded by an angry mob in the South Bronx trying to arrest someone who was known to be a real lowlife, I have seen a cop walk the other way when the job site was being shaken down by a so called “labor coalition” that included guys with open weapons pointed at the job foreman, so I understand why cops get scared (when Amadou Diallo was killed, the cops panicked, the problem was the idiot person who had a bunch of green rookies in a so called “street squad” with no supervision in a bad area, and Diallo paid the price, there the procedure was at fault more than the cops).
Two little glimpses into another society.
- [Piece from Israel](http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/193227/whats-the-difference-between-being-black-in-israel-and-america?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=26624c4025-Sunday_September_6_20159_4_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-26624c4025-206793253) by a woman with an Ethiopian-Israeli boyfriend whose brother is in the US. The brother in the US flicked a cigarette out of his car window and that provoked a massive police response. She says, "ask the average Ethiopian why they are protesting in the Jewish state and the usual answer you will get is that they don’t want Israel to turn into America. Get that? They don’t want it to turn into America. In the experience of people like my boyfriend, Israel is nowhere near that level today. And Ethiopian-Israelis want to keep it that way, ensuring their country does not adopt any of America’s attitudes or systemic policies regarding race. As my boyfriend once darkly pointed out, “At least in Israel if the police beat you, they will not kill you.”"
- One of my favorite dyspeptic writers is Sayed Kashua, an Arab-Israeli and misanthrope who articulates being both a minority and not feeling at all part of the larger Arab society. The New Yorker profiled him (9/7 issue) now living in Illinois for at least a few years (where he teaches advanced Hebrew because that's how conflicted his life is) and that article contrasts bluntly with the next article, which is about Bill Bratton's legacy and the issue of race in America as seen through policing and the use of lifestyle offenses to impose force. The former is filled with relatively minute explorations of class and ethnic/racial differences in Israel, some good and some bad like anywhere (and including that Kashua and a Jewish Israeli partner put on Israeli TV a largely Arabic language comedy). The latter, though about our own country, is to me less nuanced: statistics about how minorities and whites see the police, defenses and attacks on policy.
^^ @Lergnom, I actually lived in Israel back in the 90s for a couple of years, and I can tell you that some of my Ethiopian friends were very unhappy with the way law enforcement treated them (especially males). One Eithiopian Jewish friend always had a Malcolm X bracelet on whenever I saw him, and was often seething with anger over these issues.