Admittedly the case of the NBA player’s confrontation with the NYPD was not a matter of life or death. But both a jury and the official Civilian Complaint Review Board found the player’s testimony to be truthful…meaning that the police officers lied. What also gives me great discomfort is that the District Attorney offered the player a deal…PLEAD GUILTY, which the player refused! Aren’t prosecutors supposed to investigate these matters BEFORE reaching a conclusion?
This one is interesting. Could get ugly if he decides to sue for lost wages due to injury.
The exclamation point in your thread title implies the police lying is a notable occurrence. Are you really surprised that police lie? Happens all the time. I think the right title would have been “For once, a police lie was exposed!”
“the Police Lied”…police lie all the time you know who else does…your neighbors, family, friends, the president , managers at fast food restaurants, teachers, news reporters (not just brian williams) plumbers deep sea fisherman…
everyone minus one group…used car salesmen…they are always honest!
The difference is that the police’s job depends on trust that they are unbiased, that their testimony is unimpeachable , and when they lie, when they break that trust, it makes their job hard if not impossible. Cops are being paid to be professional, we aren’t talking casual lying. One of the things cops don’t seem to understand is the ‘thin blue line’ mentality they often have, like when they cover for a cop who just ran someone over and killed them because they were drunk, or for a corrupt cop on the take, is that it breaks the trust of all people; when it is the residents of inner city neighborhoods, usually minorities, they can preach to the choir of the law and order chorus and complain that ‘those people don’t trust us’ or “they refuse to talk”, but when you have cops engaged in gross misconduct, all but the most die hard supporters start wondering what the heck is going on. My first instinct, growing up the way I did, was to trust that cops were generally professionals, but over the years, while I still tend to give cops the benefit of the doubt, that trust has eroded.
musicprint…cops are humans and they are drawn from society it should not shock you that some police lie. the president of the united states lies and he is the most powerful person in the world. surely you can not be shocked that a police officer who can start at a salary io 25-26,000 a year…doing a thankless job may lie too.
you think just cops are dirty or corrupt and lie etc…you confuse human nature and the myth that some professions and the people who do those jobs some how have more integrity. just focusing on the united states… we have lying, cheating, corruption, cover ups, ignoring of cases , diversions, and other nefarious and criminal activity that involves people at the DoJ, the White House, and every other branch and government department of our country. but cops who are the bottom of totem poll are somehow different?
Cops are humans, but cops often go around complaining how people don’t trust them, that they are treated as the enemy and an occupying force, yet they don’t put two and two together and realize that their behavior is at the root of it. It isn’t just about race, people in minority communities don’t necessarily trust black or hispanic cops either, they see the problem in the culture of the cops. It is one thing to say that politicians are dishonest or lie, that we have lying and cheating in the government, but what you are leaving out is those are removed from most people, whereas cops affect their lives. If a politician cheats or lies or is corrupt, it doesn’t affect people’s lives as much as that cop making 40,000 a year, if a cop acts out their sons can end up dead for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, if a cop gets drunk and runs over and kills a family member and the other cops cover for him, they are faced with knowing that the person who did it was covered up for by his buddies, and so forth.Cops are in people’s daily lives, and when you have something like Ferguson, where the corrupt cops were used basically to screw money out of the minority community will all kinds of trumped up offenses, or where a young man is killed seemingly simply for being black. Cops are in a unique place to affect people in their regular lives, and a lying president doesn’t generally leave a kid dead in the street the way cops will (not to say that isn’t always the case, think about a president going to war under false pretenses, and kids end up dead).
Musicprnt; Bravo! Well said.
Zobroward; Sorry, that’s rationalization and a poor excuse for official misconduct.
As a teacher, I am constantly reminded that I am held to a higher standard due to my position influencing young people. Similarly, police are also held to a higher standard–their lies can ruin lives of innocent people. I expect more integrity from policemen than I do from a plumber or car salesman, etc.
I don’t mind presidents and police alike lying about whether they had sex with that or any woman or not. I do mind police lying to convict the innocent, or lying to cover up a homicide.
@sorghum:
Thank you, that is well said, there also is the impact of the lying. To equate trumping up evidence to put someone away who is innocent, or covering up for buddy who had been drinking after shift and killed someone by drunk driving, with Clinton lying about Lewinsky, or a politician saying “I can balance the budget, cut taxes and leave SS alone”, is just plain idiotic, but I hear it all the time. It reminds me of the more than a few defenders of the Catholic Church and their handling of the priestly abuse scandal, arguing a)the people not in the church abuse children and b)that coverups also happen in things like school systems or universities, so therefore picking on the church is nothing more than bias…which leaves out something, the Church is an organization that sets itself as something you are supposed to look up to, and sets itself as the moral arbitrator in life, and as such is in a very different position, when they fail its impact is much, much more than with others (not to mention "well, they do it, so why is it so bad if I do it…like, really, didn’t their mother explain that if Johnny does something doesn’t mean that you should be doing it, or that that is a defense against doing wrong?).
For the record, I am not unsympathetic to cops, I have known more than a few, who worked jobs that can expose them to the worst of things, SWAT kind of cops that raid the hideouts of drug dealers and the like and don’t know if they are coming home, and I have known more than a few really good, dedicated ones, who care. The problem I have with cops is they need to understand that the “Thin Blue Line” and the mentality around protecting bad cops is even more of a problem for them as it is for non cops, that they are making a difficult job even harder on themselves when someone acts as judge, jury and executioner. Unlike the BLM movement, that frames this as racism, it isn’t entirely, because a lot of minority group members get killed by fellow minorities, black kids get killed by black and hispanic cops, hispanics by hispanic cops, the real problem is the mentality IMO, of looking at the people they are supposed to protect as garbage or worse, with contempt. Joseph Wambaugh in one of his cop novels talked about a tough beat cop, white, who in one of the books talks about his partner, who happens to be black, and says “I don’t even notice he is black, he is a fellow cop, and I realized he hated N****** as much as I do”…the idea that black or hispanic cops would necessarily be more sympathetic or behave more acceptably doesn’t always hold true, for example, studies they did in NYC at one point showed that black and hispanic cops were actually more likely to use their weapon than white cops were (I don’t know if that is still true, this was like 20 years ago or so; the real problem IMO is cop culture that looks at others as ‘non cops’ and thus ‘the enemy’ in some ways.