“On June 26, 2020, a Loveland, Colorado cop violently arrested a frail, elderly, confused woman, breaking her bones,” I previously posted on April 17, 2021, here. “Karen Garner, 73, who suffers from dementia, had wandered away from her family to a nearby Walmart store, picked up $13.88 of merchandise, and walked out.”
What followed next was, well, read that posting.
Since then, three Loveland cops have been fired for their actions in connection with that incident. But now there’s even more.
Two of the ex-cops now face criminal charges. The tabloid Daily Mail says (here) they were romantically involved, and living together, even though one of them was married. We also now know what merchandise Garner left the store with: “a soda, a candy bar, a T-shirt, and wipe refills in a Walmart store.” For that, she suffered numerous broken bones, and was thrown in jail in that condition.
Jail surveillance footage (photo, left), Daily Mail says, “shows she cried out for help 51 times in the first hour alone while the officers sat ignoring her just 10 feet away,” according to allegations in the lawsuit her family and legal representatives have filed against the city.
(I predict this fiasco will settle out of court — there’s no way the defendants can let a jury decide this — and probably for north of a million bucks. As usual, the taxpayers — not the guilty parties — will pay, either directly or through higher insurance premiums in the future; which by itself is problematical.)
This incident isn’t unique. Cops, after all, are human like the rest of us. But some humans are more flawed than others, or better suited for police work than others, and U.S. police departments in general often aren’t making those distinctions when they recruit and hire cops. In fact, many small-town police departments will take other police agencies’ rejects just to save money on training costs (see, for example this story).
As the Daily Mail article notes, “The outcry over how the woman was treated comes amid a national reckoning over use of force by police, including against people with mental and physical health conditions.” And, we might add, people of color and, yes, children, too.
That reckoning has been a long time coming, but inevitably would come as cases of police abuse piled up. For too long, the wrong people have been hired for police work, and/or have been poorly trained and inadequately supervised, and taxpayers have gotten stuck with the bills for their misconduct — while bad cops enjoyed immunity from prosecution, personal liability, and even discipline, and remained on the force (Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s killer, and 17 previous excessive force complaints against him).
Obviously, that immunity system isn’t working; and a few jurisdictions — like Washington state — have begun taking steps to reform it, but most states are still dragging their heels.
It helps, too, to have diligent journalists getting on top of these stories, and exposing police abuse and misconduct, which often is an essential catalyst to extracting a response from foot-dragging officialdom that would otherwise rather sweep these incidents under a rug. Some people think such news reporting is unpatriotic or anti-police. (These tend to be people who are wrong about most other things, too.) It’s neither. Rooting out bad cops can only improve the performance of police agencies and protect the reputation of police. There are plenty of good cops who don’t deserve to be dragged down into the mud by the bad apples in their ranks. Ridding police departments of bad cops strengthens law enforcement and is supportive of the good ones.
As for the other angle in this story, cops are human, but workplaces like the rest of society need rules. CEOs of major corporations get fired for dallying with employees; even Bill Gates, for a long time the world’s richest person and one of the most powerful people in business, was kicked off his own board of directors by the company he founded for that behavior. The former CEO of McDonald’s was fired for that. Military commanders, including high-ranking ones, get sacked for that.
Employers don’t necessarily need to forbid dating among their employees in all cases. Lots of couples met their partners at work. It’s a natural setting for developing relationships, and that doesn’t have to be harmful if it doesn’t disrupt the workplace or interfere with the work. But it has greater potential than casual settings to become problematical, for example if it turns into harassment, there’s a supervisory relationship involved, or it’s a meretricious relationship (as this was).
The charges against the two romantically-involved Loveland ex-cops include: “Hopp is facing second-degree assault, attempt to influence a public servant and official misconduct. Jalali is facing charges of failing to report a use of force, failing to intervene and official misconduct.” It’s easy to see how, in this case, police misconduct snowballed in the context of, and was aggravated by, the existence of a personal relationship. For that reason, the existence of that relationship is material. These cops shouldn’t have been working together.
Now, they aren’t anymore. But it would have been better if a more diligent chain of command had seen to it they didn’t in the first place.