A Cincinnati police officer “caught on body camera letting loose a stream of expletives and racial slurs is defending herself by claiming she wasn’t referring to all African-Americans,” but only the 16-year-old who flipped her off.
Officer Rose Valentino didn’t deny saying, “[Expletive] [N-words]. I [expletive] hate them.” After all, it was recorded on her bodycam. She asked Internal Affairs to put it in context.
“Valentino that she doesn’t use racial slurs and has no racial biases,” their report says.
That report also says “Valentino has been previously investigated for improperly sharing body camera footage of a homicide scene ‘o family members over dinner,’ was once arrested for punching her sister and brother-in-law, and has also faced investigation for failing to turn on her body camera during her shifts and even while pursuing suspects.”
Which makes you wonder why she didn’t turn it off before going off on her N-word rant against a kid. Didn’t she realize she’d get caught? Given her track record, she most likely didn’t care.
While there’s plenty of categorical, and lately overt, racism in our society, I’ve noticed that in many instances racist behavior is triggered by somebody being annoyed by something. (You’ll see this in quite a few YouTube videos of racist incidents.) For example, an argument over loud noise, or an argument in a supermarket aisle. Some people will say the kid shouldn’t have flipped off the cop (you can read the details of what that was all about here and here), what kind of parenting did he have, etc. etc. Not to defend to kid or what he did, but look, between a kid and an adult, you expect the adult to be the grownup in that situation, right? And when the adult is a cop, you don’t expect her to bring herself down to the kid’s level. By the time you’re a cop policing the streets, it’s time for kid behavior to be behind you.
I’ll wrap this up by repeating what I’ve written all along in my posts on this blog about bad police behavior: We don’t need no cops, or necessarily fewer cops; we need better cops. That requires not only weeding out inadequates like Valentino, but a systemic overhaul of recruiting, training, supervision, and discipline. The leaders of our nation’s more than 18,000 police agencies, in many if not most cases, just aren’t doing a good enough job of that. We’re in trouble because people like Valentino are policing our streets.
