There are stories about a guy who gets a terrible beating from cops because he wasn’t sufficiently respectful and obsequious, and they could. These are bad stories, often terrible stories, but they come out because there is someone who cares about the fellow beaten. What about some homeless guy, a person who barely exists in our society.
Who would know if the cops beat him to death for nothing? Who will care. Via Carlos Miller‘s pixiq page :
There’s a video that goes with this, though it’s not of the beating so much as the reaction of onlookers to the beating. Thomas yelled out as he was being tazed and beaten to death by police, “dad, dad.” It’s impossible to know what happened that put Thomas on the street, mentally ill, homeless and alone, but whatever it was, however it happened, there is no person who ceases, at some level, to be the child of a parent.Kelly Thomas, a 37-year-old homeless man with schizophrenia, kept calling for his father as police beat and tased him repeatedly.
But his father, a retired Orange County sheriff’s deputy, was not around.
It wasn’t until after Thomas slipped into a coma and was hospitalized with multiple injures that his father saw him.
And by then, it was too late. Thomas never recovered. The 135-pound man died five days after his run-in with Fullerton police.
The LA Times reports:
This is the face Thomas’ father saw.Thomas’ father, a retired Orange County sheriff’s deputy, has asserted that officers used excessive force to subdue his son, who was unarmed, slight and of medium height.
After seeing his son’s injuries and talking with witnesses, Thomas told the Register his son “was brutally beaten to death.”
“When I first walked into the hospital, I looked at what his mother described as my son … I didn’t recognize him,” Thomas said. “This is cold-blooded, aggravated murder.”
Thomas, citing witnesses, said officers hit his son with the butts of flashlights even after he stopped moving.
He said his son was probably off his medication and didn’t understand officers’ commands.
What sort of hate-filled animals would do this to another human being? Fullerton police officers.
And who cares what they do to some crazy, homeless man? Carlos Miller does. Mike Riggs at Reason does. Radley Balko does. I do. I hope you do.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I’d say the explanation of it is that criminals of the police persuasion are virtually immune from repercussions for misconduct.
I posted this on my usual conservative portal/blog website yesterday. The site’s been around since the Clinton administration and gets lots of comments and of course exponentially more reads. I checked to see the responses just now after reading your post. I really wasn’t sure what the response would be. It turned out 27 out of 30 commenters were completely appalled.
It’s too bad what should be the natural lobbying group for police accountability, the criminal defense bar, seems generally more interested in defending government unions than doing something to make cops accountable.
To get to that critical 10 percent of the electorate who cares intensely enough about this issue enough to do something about, which you discussed in your overcriminzlization post the other day, will be very hard without bipartisan support. Given the Obama/Holder justice department’s authoritarian bent, I’m not real optimistic about the left side of the equation.
The latent-made-patent, hate and rage in cops is inhumane. What scares me is not only how widespread it is, but how almost any outrage perpetrated by the cops can be covered in demagogic appeals to “toughness” and “law and order.” The “us against them” mentality perverts and distorts justice by seeming to the cops, at least, justification for any outrage including murder. Witness the post Katrina/Danzinger Bridge murders and cover-ups now unraveling in US District Court in New Orleans.
I’m horrified and disgusted at the treatment of this man. I tend to be slightly left of center politically (if I can submit to such oversimplification). I don’t honestly see how this is a partisan issue, though. Which politician(s), on either side, are going to risk looking “soft on crime” by opposing this kind of behavior? And, what could politicians actually do, anyway? If a cop is going to murder, why not call the behavior what it is?
“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
As an aside, I’m afraid I don’t understand the comment about the criminal defense bar’s interest in defending government unions. Do you have an example?
I’m not normally a fan of tougher criminal laws. But I would support a general statute that increased the punishment for any crime a police officer is convicted of.
To me, it’s a much bigger threat to the public when a police officer commits an assault than anybody else. The same is true when a police officer lies under oath. Or when they steal or commit crimes based on fraud. The fact that they are cops shouldn’t insulate them — it should intensify the severity of their crime.
Would that have helped this guy? No. But I’m not sure how to send a stronger signal to police that we do not consider them above the law. If anything, it is more important that *they* follow the law than we do.
It won’t stop until cop culture changes, and it can only change from the inside. The laws exist. They mean nothing.
A headline in today’s Star-Tribune: “Cost of Minneapols [sic] police payouts could hit record this year”. Lets see… no criminal liability for police misconduct, and a record amount of other people’s money spent in settlements of the resulting lawsuits. Were there repercussions for the cops? It sure doesn’t sound like it to me.
But, the increase in settlement amounts is because lawyers cost so much. I know because that’s what the Minneapolis police chief said in the interview, and a cop wouldn’t lie, right?