Let’s face it, cops are human, just like the rest of us.
So we have to accept that sometimes they’re stupid, lazy, do sloppy work, and aren’t as careful as they should be. The only questions are how much taxpayer money juries should give the victims of their boneheaded screwups, and what should happen to them.
Bethany Farber (photo below, left) was wanted on a Texas warrant.
Bethany K. Farber (photo below, right), 30, of Los Angeles, who’s never been in Texas and has no criminal record, was nabbed at the L.A. airport by TSA agents, handed over to L.A. cops, and held in the L.A. county jail without bail for 13 days because cops and jail guards refused to listen to her when she tried to tell them they arrested the wrong Bethany Farber. (Read story here.)
There’s no excuse for that. As this website points out, “There are ways in which we distinguish one John Doe from another. There are mug shots. Fingerprints. Social security numbers and dates of birth. These distinguishing factors have been around for decades, routinely used to identify one person from another, because in a nation of 330 million, names are occasionally used twice. Often more than twice.”
Verifying identities is a routine part of police work. And there were red flags from the get-go. While I can’t find much information about the wanted person, she’s described in news accounts as “older” (and looks older), has a vastly different appearance, and this story says the two women have “different dates of birth and middle names.” But apart from all that, when someone denies they’re the person in the warrant, shouldn’t someone at least check that out?
It gets worse. Despite a “zero bail” warrant (for the other woman), Farber was kept in jail for 13 days in violation of her rights, in a cell she described as “freezing” and “terrifying as she suffered through inmates screaming and crying, fights breaking out, and even people throwing human feces on the wall.”
It gets still worse. She claims the incident “has led to her suffering from anxiety, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and even the death of her grandmother. According to Farber’s attorneys, her grandmother suffered a stress-induced stroke when she learned that ‘her only granddaughter’ had been arrested” and then died in a hospital a few days later, according to a Los Angeles TV station (story here).
That goes to the question of damages; liability is going to be slam-dunk, maybe even a directed verdict by the judge (in which the jury is instructed to find the defendants liable and only decide the amount of damages).
Spending 13 days in jail for something you didn’t do might not sound like that big a deal to some readers. They might figure that paying her $1,000 a day — or $13,000 — should take care of it. Nope. When you factor in the humiliation, damage to reputation, lasting trauma (and potential need for long-term counseling and therapy — the jury probably will hear testimony about sleepness nights and nonstop crying jags), and impacts on her family (including the grandmother’s death), you’ve probably got half a million dollars or more of harm here.
The next question is: What’s going to happen to the cops who screwed this up? Anything? At the very least, they should get Special High Intensity Training. (If you don’t know what that is, try its acronym.) Or will the taxpayers have to foot the bill and continue to pay their salaries? That’s what usually happens when dumb cops mess up badly.
