Steven Greenhut at the OC Register is apparently pretty fed up too.
Civil libertarians are gnashing their teeth over the Bush administration's wire-tapping without warrants of phone calls of suspected terrorists. Although I, too, have some concerns about this policy, I don't lie awake at night worrying that the feds are going to tap my telephone lines.
On the other hand, I do worry about the ability of local law enforcement to turn my life, or other people's lives, into living hell. Police malfeasance isn't a rare occurrence, but a regular feature of modern life, even if the abuses don't often get the attention garnered by the police shooting in Chino last week.
Most of us have seen the grainy videotape. After a short chase, San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies pull over a Corvette, whose passenger is a U.S. Air Force security officer, Elio Carrion.
A deputy tells Carrion to stay on the ground, then tells him to stand, yelling "get up, get up." Carrion calmly tells the officer, "I'm going to get up," at which point the deputy begins firing, hitting Carrion three times. Carrion wasn't armed, and, reports suggest, that neither he nor the driver is being charged with a crime.
On the video, viewers hear the deputy yelling at Carrion, calling him a "punk," and also see him kicking at Carrion.
In typical fashion, the president of the deputies union complained that the video was aired on TV and said: "To paint every cop in California as bad people because one incident happened, and we don't know the facts, is just wrong." No one is painting every cop as bad. But it is a good thing an observer had the video camera running, or else it would have been the officer's word against the victim's. You know how that goes. The officer who shot Carrion would have claimed that Carrion was resisting arrest, and we would nod along, figuring the guy got what was coming to him.
...
Note that after Carrion was shot, the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department said publicly that it has never filed charges against an officer for an on-duty shooting, according to a radio news report. Some critics argue that police have a "gang mentality," which means that one member of the gang won't rat out another member, even if that person did something atrocious.
So much for accountability.
Do you think the officer who shot Elio Carrion would be facing investigations, including by the FBI, had there been no videotape? What if Carrion wasn't an honored member of the U.S. military serving in Iraq, but just some poor Latino kid?
Even more disturbing was when I watched the local, national (CBS or ABC) and Fox News at 6, this video was not shown. Instead some lighthearted video of a policeman getting hit with a passing cars side mirror was shown. I don't know why a policeman shooting an unarmed, fully compliant man on video was not a gigantic story.
UPDATE: The officer was finally charged with attempted manslaughter.
1 comment:
You are absolutely right. I keep wondering when people in this country are going to wake up to the reality of the wide-spread law enforcement misconduct and corruption that takes place all across this country every day in every single jurisdiction. It's not just illegal shootings like this one, or brutality or racism. It goes all the way down to routine lying by "law enforcement" in so many cases it would make your head explode. I think the media's malfeasance is a big part of the problem. They just don't get it. Maybe the bubble-heads who cover the news are really as naive as I suspect. I think they actually believe the police never lie or commit crimes and are angels in blue completely above scrutiny. In the rare instances when the media actually dedicates a few seconds to such a story, they seem genuinely surprised and tend to downplay witness accounts in favor of the "cut-and-dried" version proffered by the police who are usually just covering their butts.
If the media only knew how many slimeballs are attracted to a career in "law enforcement".
Now we are learning the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department began an immediate investigation into the guy who filmed the shooting of the airman. He has been pulled over three times since the incident and his vehicle fully searched. Can you say bald-faced police harassment? Why he consents to search is anyone's guess. he probably doesn't know he can refuse permission, but they would just bring in a drug dog and claim it "hit" on something in order to create bogus probable cause to search. They also routinely pull that stunt and get away with it even when nothing is found after the fact (Remember the Middle Eastern medical students who were surrounded on a Florida highway and the police sent in a robotic explosive "sniffer" that they claimed detected explosives in the vehicle, thus giving them cause to search? There were no explosives, but the media never followed up to question the bogus police claims).
The latest word is that the guy who filmed the shooting has been arrested on a warrant from Florida. Golly gosh, I can't imagine why his name was run through NCIC all of a sudden. Was there some probable cause to run his name? Of course not, he just happened to document law enforcement committing a crime, and the persecution for that "offense" is severe.
The FBI is investigating whether a "civil rights" violation was committed??? More like attempted murder, ongoing coverup and witness intimidation. Sounds more like organized crime.
Thanks for adding your spotlight to this non-isolated incident of injustice.
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