It’s Okay to Tell Lies About Cops

Officer.com ^ | November 4th, 2005 | Tim Dees

[Cathy]

I just don't assume a cop is lying.

[Black Tooth]

Most complaints are not he said/she said, most are "he violated my civil right by (fill in the blank

No they are not.

Most complaint are traffic stop related, and the citizen has little or nothing for protection. The courts, judges and cops are basically all on the same payroll. The same team. Just like going into traffic court for example. It's your word against the officer. 99 percent of the time, his co-worker, the judge, sides with the officer. Same thing in traffic stop altercations/incidents. There is little or no evidence on who said what, and what occurred. Nearly all the time, the Judge will side with the cop. They work for the same company. LOL!~

[HEY4QDEMS]

I just don't assume a cop is lying

Nor do I, but I also don't dismiss it out of hand.

[Cathy]

Neither do I. I don't think it is rampant.

[siunevada]

Never trust any LEO. Never.

Not much choice. I trust them with my life. So far, it's worked out.

Having worked with and known a lot of LEO over many years, I never met one that was totally honest.

Having worked with and known many LEO for a few decades, I have found them to be amazingly dedicated to serving the public and maintaining the truth, regardless of who is in the wrong. Especially another LEO. If an LEO is crooked, there is no mercy, no making excuses.

[Cathy]

You and I are in a minority on this thread.

Thanks for your post.

[Black Tooth]

Not much choice. I trust them with my life. So far, it's worked out.

Really? How many times have they saved your life? How many times have they stopped you from becoming a victim of crime?

[Ajnin]

Not only do honest complaints not end in criminal charges most false complaints don't either.

[L98Fiero]

"You and I are in a minority on this thread."

A sad fact. You can't differentiate FReepers from DUers sometimes. A lot of both just hate the cops and for apparently the same reasons. They have authority over them.

[siunevada]

Really? How many times have they saved your life?

Prevented the attempt? Maybe a couple of dozen times. Imminent, right now, freeze or I'll shoot? Three times.

[coloradan]

Years later on his deathbed he asked for forgiveness, it was given.

Too bad you didn't tape that conversation and put it on the web.

[coloradan]

Especially another LEO. If an LEO is crooked, there is no mercy, no making excuses.

In other words, the Thin Blue Line is a Big Fat Lie. You don't suppose ATF or FBI agents lied about themselves and each other after Waco and Ruby Ridge (where innocent people died)?

[Rockingham]

That is the problem. A few years ago, my then very pro-law enforcement brother caught a corrupt small town police chief lying in affidavits about the disposal of drug evidence. There was reason to suspect that the chief transmitted the drugs to criminal allies or gave them back to the original perp.

The city council let the chief off -- under severe and thuggish pressure from the local PBA, whose principal legal adviser was a criminal defense attorney who was a close friend of the chief. A state investigation by a special prosecutor who was a former cop also took no action, claiming that the chief had made "inadvertent mistakes" in filing three false affidavits with the local court falsely claiming that seized drugs had been disposed of according to statutory procedures.

When caught, the chief gave different stories but eventually settled on a claim that he took the drugs home and burned them in his backyard grill. The former cop prosecutor who supposedly investigated the matter never even took statements under oath from the chief or required him to file corrective affidavits with the local court.

And this was a police chief with a long and well-known reputation in local law enforcement circles as being incompetent, corrupt, racist, and abusive to his own officers. A later PBA head for the area was shocked to learn of the perjury episode and his own organization's conduct, but like his predecessors, eventually sold out his member officers who complained of the chief's dishonest and abusive conduct.

The local newspaper knew this and much more against the chief but sat silent because, according to one of their own reporters, the chief's criminal defense attorney pal has influence with the paper as the preferred attorney for editors and reporters who get into criminal law scrapes.

My brother is bitter enough about the experience that I have heard him mention that, to his own distress, when he now hears of a dead cop, he wonders if good cop or an especially bad type of criminal has died.

When cops lie under oath or to investigators or commit other crimes, they too often get the insiders advantage against investigation and prosecution. Knowledgeable observers of all kinds of experience confirm this publicly, as does a close friend of mine who is a former cop. Indeed, in an unrelated episode, that former cop friend and I worked to discredit a corrupt ex-cop with a criminal record in another state who become a politically connected local fire chief.

As for me, long before my brother did, I came to abandon blind belief in cops or anyone else and to trust nothing except facts and my own judgment and experience, as weak and fallible as they so often are.

The Ninth Circuit may have been wrong in its reasoning, but I like the result of cops not being able to punish those who complain against them unless the cops themselves, in concept at least, they are subject to the same penalties.

[Cathy]

"How many times have they stopped you from becoming a victim of crime?"

Most of the time you wouldn't know - they aren't your personal body guards. If they catch a rapist or a car jacker they are preventing you "the public" from being a victim from that criminal.

[Joe Miner]

lead to a prosecutor taking action

Like the one after Delay?

[The Red Zone]

Their significance is much greater in the fact that their existence and such work that they do shows that the society cares about crime, than in actually catching most malefactors. I.e. a moral statement. Being as such, it's not good to add to the moral statement that ultimately there aren't any morals.

[Cathy]

I'm not claiming there isn't prosecutorial misconduct - as a matter of fact I can remember several incidents locally where prosecutors have gone after LEO's unjustly - believe me they aren't afraid to go after the cops.

[Cathy]

I must be brain dead after a particularly long Monday, but I din't even follow what you said.

[siunevada]

You don't suppose ATF or FBI agents lied about themselves and each other after Waco and Ruby Ridge (where innocent people died)?

I've never worked with federal agents. Of course it's possible they covered up their responsibility for purposely causing the deaths of innocent persons.

[TChris]

Isn't this issue already covered by laws prohibiting the filing of a false report and or those prohibiting libel and slander?