This article contains news with liberal commentary.
While the most dishonest person in America campaigns on “law and order,” public trust in police is eroding to the point where it’s almost gone.
It doesn’t help when police are caught lying. Hardly anyone believes the cops who battered down Breonna Taylor’s apartment door announced themselves; most of the witnesses say they didn’t, and the prosecutor won’t go to court with that against her boyfriend who shot one of them. What does that tell you? Who gets off for shooting a cop, unless the cops screwed up, and are lying about what happened?
On Saturday, September 13, 2020, two L.A. deputies were ambushed while sitting in their patrol car. An ugly protest occurred outside the emergency room, where a small anti-police crowd gathered, and some identified person was heard shouting, “I hope they die.”
Josie Huang, an NPR reporter covering the event, was one of two people arrested at the scene. She was only doing her constitutionally protected job. But cops grabbed her, violently threw her to the ground, handcuffed her, and carted her off to jail.
On Friday, September 15, 2020, the D.A. dropped all charges against Huang, because video evidence irrefutably proves she’s innocent and the cops’ charges against her and official reports are a pack of lies. They said she didn’t identify herself as a reporter. She did. They said she was obstructing them. She wasn’t. They said she didn’t comply with their commands. They never gave her a chance.
And what do you want to bet the fact she’s Asian-American had nothing to do with how they treated her? There’s so much police racism in this country we’ve been conditioned to take it for granted.
Read story here, here, and here.
Huang probably can sue the cops, and probably will, for a variety of torts including violating her civil rights, assault and battery, wrongful arrest, wrongful imprisonment, and defamation. But that solves nothing, and deters nothing, because the cops won’t pay a cent; an insurance company or taxpayers will.
These cops should be fired. Police have too much power over citizens to overlook something as serious as false arrest on trumped-up charges based on lies. They also should be prosecuted. Lying on police reports is a crime in most, if not all, jurisdictions. Enforcing those laws will send a message to lying cops, and might actually deter some of that behavior.
Most police officers are honorable people who perform a difficult and sometimes dangerous job well. Those cops deserve our wholehearted support. But American policing has serious problems with how it recruits, trains, supervises, and disciplines police officers. Those problems need to be addressed. Good cops, and those who support them, should support intelligent and constructive police reform, because their work is undermined and the profession is dragged into disrepute by the bad eggs. One of the most-needed changes is there should be a universally clear understanding that intentional lying automatically ends a police career.
Photo: Josie Huang’s arrest
Carl Kolchak with the INdependent News Service sends his regards, and his work tried to bring to light that Chicago cops regularly lied to the public.