A verdict was returned in the trial of bartender Karolina Obrycka, beaten by off-duty drunken Chicago cop, Anthony Abbate, and the police culture that covers up criminal conduct by cops, the “Code of Silence.” The jury found against the Code of Silence, awarding Obrycka $850,000..
Coupled with Chicago’s admission that its non-police personnel didn’t know that they, like those who don’t feed off the public till, are supposed to abide by the law, and the California verdict premised on ten cops falsely denying any memory in the case of cuffing Allen Harris, it’s beginning to appear that people have had enough police and public officials causing harm and believing themselves to be above the law.Her attorney, Terry Ekl, heralded the verdict as a landmark, precedent-setting decision.
“We proved the code of silence at every level of the Chicago Police Department,” from the first officers who responded to the beating to then-Chief Phil Cline, Ekl said after the verdict, adding that the jury’s award is more than twice the $400,000 he offered to settle the case for before trial. He noted the ultimate cost to the city will be far higher once he and his team collect their attorney’s fees.
Obviously, as this was a civil case for damages against the city, the jury’s verdict wasn’t “guilty,” but rather a finding that the blue wall existed and provided the foundation for a cop like Abbate to believe that no matter what he did, how to harmed this young woman, he could do so with impunity and his brethren would cover up for him. Absent the machinations of police to conceal and silence the witnesses against him, the City of Chicago would have no liability for his conduct, it then being merely another vicious drunken cop beating a woman.
The city, naturally, is shocked.
Whether Sarah Hamilton is one of the spokespeople who misunderstood the policy that they, too, were obliged to comply with the law isn’t mentioned. Nonetheless, the City’s knee-jerk pretense that the worst kept secret of police culture wouldn’t be “approved of” in Chicago stands in contrast to the City’s lawyer’s reaction:After the verdict, [Mayor Rahm] Emanuel’s spokeswoman, Sarah Hamilton, said in a statement that the mayor is confident that the superintendent he selected, Garry McCarthy, and his leadership team “would not approve of, let alone participate in a code of silence.”
Never happened. We’re the good guys, and there’s no such thing as the Code of Silence. Except the evidence proved otherwise.At the same time, the city’s law department issued a statement that the city strongly disagreed with the verdict and all but promised an appeal.
The question really isn’t whether the Blue Wall exists, or cops lie on the witness stand. Few would make such an assertion with a straight face, and certainly no one knowledgeable who was being honest. What distinguishes this trial, particularly in light of the other recent events, is that such gross impropriety lingered just below the surface, sufficiently deniable that jurors, citizens, could pretend that it didn’t exist, pretend that there was no police culture that, when things got bad, covered up heinous conduct to protect cops from the consequences of their actions.During the civil trial, Obrycka’s attorneys alleged that police sought to downplay and cover up the beating, in part out of an ingrained but shadowy culture among police of protecting their own. They said that culture created an environment that led to the beating.
In other words, maybe it’s become too real, too pervasive, for people to ignore. And if the citizenry can’t ignore it anymore, perhaps that’s the beginning of a cultural shift in government that politicians can’t ignore it anymore. Maybe people have just had enough of people being harmed by cops. Maybe they’ve had enough of cops covering each other’s crimes.
Of course, this isn’t exactly a new concept, that the Code of Silence exists, or that police lie to cover up the crimes of their brethren. Scandals erupt, and apologists passionately mouth the one bad apple, isolated incident excuse. A commission is formed, recommendations of everyone behaving themselves from now on are issued, and life returns to the same way it’s always been. Until the next scandal for the same thing, because the disease remained and the bandaid fell off.
Yet, the confluence of important verdicts, forcing at least aware members of the public to confront the fact that these things happen, may reflect a willingness on the part of the public to demand that their elected officials deal with it. Perhaps the pervasiveness of video, watching their hero cops beating defenseless people, has rended the fabric of deniability that we’ve used to hide behind and pretend it wasn’t too bad.
Whether this verdict will be part of a new wave of recognition by the public that police misconduct, abuse, lying and concealing has got to stop has yet to be seen. But it surely won’t hurt the cause, and may well cause some to reach the only possible conclusion. The Code of Silence must come to an end.
Update: A post is up on this verdict at PoliceOne. Very interestingly, there are only two comments (always the most interesting thing there) as of yet. The first comment:
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Protect and serve, at its best. The second comment, however, brings a bit of hope.
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Update 2: Rather than risk an affirmance on appeal, Chicago has agreed to pay $850,000 to make this disappear. Rather than risk a reversal on appeal, the deal was accepted. And to make this all happen, both sides have asked the court to perform some judicial magic and nunc pro tunc the verdict into oblivion, as if it never happened. Money talks.
Update 3: Despite both parties seeking to vacate the judgment, the court refused to do so, noting that the verdict, thought not precedent, had social value and would not be made to disappear.
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Just another shining example of Scalia’s “New Professionalism.”
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. Yup, it’s the new professionalism.
I recall an old song with the lyric: “Video killed the radio star” or something like that.
Now, it is “Video killed the Blue Wall of Silence”. The rise of cell-phone and other video catching the police behaving badly has totally changed the game.
That’s been the thrust of my “but for video” posts, that neither judges nor the public can continue to deny that these things happen as they see video after video, where before it was always the defendant’s word against the cop’s. And the cop always won the pissing match.
Maybe, just maybe, the game is changing.
But the video just sparks the media publicity, the public outcry, the official statement of shock that this sort of thing would happen – and then it happens again the next day but someone didn’t catch it on video. And then two years pass as the case makes it way through the judicial system and everyone forgets about it. I agree that the videos and the jury verdicts are making a difference, but it seems to be like throwing a bucket of water on a wildfire – it helps, but it doesn’t stop the forest from burning.
That’s the concern. We’ve had plenty of scandals in the past that amounted to big news for a few hours, and then were promptly forgotten as life returned to normal. The question is whether the videos and verdicts will have enough of an impact on the judicial and public mindset that they no longer reject the idea that maybe the cop is lying, maybe the defendant (or victim) is telling the truth, even when there’s no video to prove it.
Whether this is enough to overcome the pro-cop presumption is hard to say, and hardly a given. But we can keep pounding away at it. And keep hoping.
These last two posts you did on the blue wall remind me of the absolute importance of the vicinage clause, not just to protect the rights of the accused but to protect the rights of the people in the vicinage. Both of your recent posts involve cases tried before urban juries. Had they been tried before a Los Angeles jury instead of one in Simi Valley, the cops who beat Rodney King would almost certainly have been convicted and thus the 1992 riots averted. Suburban juries are almost certainly less likely to understand the dark side of cop culture than urban juries are.
According to the Chicago Tribune article linked to in an earlier Simple Justice article, the original incident happened almost six years ago.
Do we know if Abbate ever faced criminal charges? What would that be, maybe assault or assault and battery?
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Furry cows moo and decompress.
Very true. But we take the wins where we can, and hope that even the real housewives of orange county read the morning papers. They’re the hardest to change as they have the most vested in the system as it exists. Not that they favor abuse and misconduct, so much as they favor being favored by the system.
If you clicked on the link to my earlier post on this case, you would find your answers.
The game now is to steal the camera and destroy it/erase the incriminating evidence.
The countermeasure citizens can use are apps that stream the video to someone out of reach of the cop/Feeb in question, say a server in Toronto.
This is about as far off topic as it goes.
It’s progress, but in the end the guilty cops still have their freedom, their badges, and all their money. If I were the plaintiff I wouldn’t dare set foot in Chicago again — they can easily do it all again, and are unlikely to get caught again.