Officer, it's Black and White- You Serve Us

In elementary school I learned that Officer Friendly served the community. I was impressed that squad cars carried the motto “To Serve and Protect.” That made the fine point that police were authority empowered by and serving the people. When I grew older I noticed that the motto had been inverted to “To Protect and Serve.” I don't think this was an accident.

Keegan Hamilton reported last Saturday on RFT Blogs that a man was tasered at a concert at Washington University in St. Louis, MO after resisting arrest and taking his clothes off. He refused a Concert Security request to leave. Security called the cops, who asked him to put his shirt back on. Instead, he took off his pants; that's not even sort of the same thing. Police tried to handcuff him. He resisted. “He was tased in the ass for a prolonged period of time,” one female witness stated. “It was terrible.”

Concertgoers headed for the exits and a large crowd gathered just outside the door. Several people yelled at the police officers standing near the exits, “Don’t taze me bro,” and “You serve us.”

RFT blogs promises details and the police report when it becomes available. That's worth waiting for. By initial reports this fool was out of control. The case could be made that he was dangerous. Whether he deserved a 50KV kick in the ass, whether the taser was the right tool, and whether it was used excessively (as is becoming common) remains to be seen. What caught my eye was the crowd response, “You Serve Us.”

Do they still? Do they enforce the laws enacted by a government that answers to the people, or do they believe that they ARE the law? Read a few cop blogs and you'll be surprised. At best, we're referred to as “civilians”. This is an improper distinction. Police, in a very legal sense, are civilians themselves, not a militia. The wordplay is their means of creating a satisfying Us vs. Them division. So is the wordplay on the side of the squad car. Service first must have rankled. Some cop, somewhere, was irked by the notion of service.

Cops need to hear that concert chant from time to time. You Serve Us. It reminds me of another chant that, whether you agreed with it or not, had an effect; “The Whole World is Watching.” Dash cams, security cams, and cell phone and video cams are everywhere in the hands of citizens. YouTube and other sites are full of video examples of police who have forgotten their mandate. From Myanmar to Minneapolis, the whole world is watching. You Serve Us.

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Oregon Cop plays fast and loose with the Truth, his DUII arrest record soars

This week the Corvallis Gazette-Times reports that city is being sued over a DUII arrest of a completely sober citizen earlier this year. Officer David Cox is widely recognized for the number of DUII arrests he's made- 27 of the total of 35 for the entire Corvallis police force in May of this year, for example. Now he's become recognized for the lousy quality of those arrests. Six of the 27 he arrested had BAC's under the legal limit and were not found to have been using drugs. About a quarter of those he arrested were either not prosecuted by the DA's office or had charges dismissed by the court.

The police department and the courts failed to rein in this cowboy and he finally busted someone who decided to sue. Cox could not smell intoxicants on the driver's breath but insinuated that he'd been drinking and smoking marijuana. The man passed a field sobriety test, blew 0.00 on a breathalyzer, and submitted urine for a drug test that found nothing but a trace amount of codeine from cold medication. He was stone cold sober.

Undeterred by lack of factual evidence, Cox wrote a highly embellished description of the man's appearance and behavior in a police report. 22 of his 27 May police reports repeated the same creative writing almost word for word. Four of the remaining five spun the language a little differently to support Cox's suspicions that drugs were involved instead of alcohol.

This incompetence would be pathetically funny if those people didn't still have DUII arrests on their records. Oregon law does not allow arrests for motor vehicle violations to be removed from a driver’s record, even if the driver was never charged or convicted. Arrest records are accessed every time a law enforcement officer stops someone, for any reason. Employers see the records when screening prospective employees, and a DUII arrest, justified or not, can have a negative effect.

“An arrest for traffic is not expungeable,” said Corvallis defense attorney Jennifer Nash. So when innocent people are arrested, “There is actual damage.”

Courts give greater weight to the testimony of an officer than to the arrested party. There are too many Coxes in uniform to tolerate this bias. In Livingston County, Illinois, where I live, similar official sleight-of-hand is common. When juveniles are stopped for suspicion of possession of marijuana and released for lack of evidence, the police report records a “street resolution” of the incident; that is, the juvenile was released at the officer's discretion. No record is made of what has not been found. The wording is deliberately chosen to avoid this and create an impression useful to the court. The report remains in the record and is considered damning by the court when the juvenile's record is reviewed. This allows the justice system to dance around the letter of the law. You will find that this is common and occurs to some degree where you live.

Let's hope Corvallis listens to its citizens. Read their comments to the article cited above on the bottom of the paper's webpage. Cox should lose his job, as should his immediate supervisor; his department should be censured, and the DA's and judges who became aware of police malfeasance when these junk arrests came before the court should be punished. Read the Whole Post (opens in a new tab or window)