Posted on 07/20/2009 6:03:46 AM PDT by grjr21
Edited on 07/20/2009 6:29:15 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
WHEN AGNES LAWLESS and three friends were inside a Lukoil convenience store in the Northeast at 3 a.m. last August, they'd all but forgotten the fender-bender in which they'd been involved moments earlier.
There was little damage, and the other driver had left the scene, near Northeast Philadelphia Airport.
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
An Internal Affairs investigation found no misconduct among officers who spoke with the clerk about the tape.
WTH? What about being an accessory to a crime? They were actively trying to cover up wrongdoing.
Sheesh, the cops son hits her and he roughs HER up? He should lost his job for good and be charged with assault, which it was.
If an ordinary citizen roughed up some judges wife hitting her and waving a gun in her face, he wouldn't stand a snowballs chance in hell of getting away with it.
Waiting for the JBT bootlicks to come on defending this cop in 5....4....3....
Lopez Sr and Jr — two out-of-control thugs who ought not be allowed to own or carry guns, nor hold down jobs in which they may exercize color-of-right or authority over their fellow citizens. Trash collection would be OK.
In some ways the hero here is the store and especially the clerk who refused to be intimidated by the cops trying to cover for their buddy.
The cop should have both criminal and civil action against him. His son misrepresented what happened (probably told Daddy that the other car hit him in order to cover up for the damage to his car. But if it wasn’t serious damage, why did he do that?) Daddy is the one at fault for simply taking his son at his word instead of first investigating to see if his son was lying to him.
Daddy should be busted big time and then Daddy should bust his son even bigger time.
These type cops act like they are the the Sheriff of Nottingham’s men, immune to action against them and can behave as if the population are nothing more than serfs.
To the JBT lovers, These are the guys who are tainting your wives/sons/daughters/husbands/fathers/mother’s profession. Clean up the ranks and and restore honor to the profession or live with the condemnation of tacitly approving of bullying thug behavior.
That's what scares me . I can see if it's one bad cop but the ones covering up for him are as responsible as the bad ones
Clearly, this man was deeply unqualified for this position and awarded it only to fill a quota. I can only imagine the stress and suffering he must endure every day in a job clearly beyond his capacity.
More and more,
I see a neo-feudalistic system developing here in America.
Interesting name, Lawless, associated with this incident and definitely should have been the cops name.
Anyone in Internal Affairs who had a hand in reaching that conclusion needs to be the subject of further investigation and disciplinary action.
Well said.
Although I seriously don’t see how anyone could excuse his behavior, even if she was the one who hit his son.
Cops should not be that out of control.
I'm also a Compassionate Conservative
Absolutely. Betcha he was threatened, too. Maybe not outright, but subtly.
Sorry, but you chose the wrong word. Feudal comes from the word for faith, trust, loyalty. It was a system of government based on honor and loyalty. It was a hell of a lot better than what followed it (royal absolutism and mercantilism). Free market capitalism is as good or as bad as the honesty and virtue of the people engaged in it. So too was feudalism—as good or as bad as the honesty and virtue of the people in charge. There were plenty of dishonest people in charge back then just as there were under the initial century or so of free market capitalism. We are now under bureaucratic state capitalism. It is bad because it almost automatically ensures that people abandon honor and virtue as they govern. Neither feudalism nor free market capitalism automatically ensure that.
Feudal is a real word. It has meaning. It ought not to be thrown around as a synonym for corruption. All systems of political organization are susceptible to corruption. Some are more susceptible than others. The feudal system, because the glue that held it together was honor, was not the worst of what history has seen. (The worst are systems held together by sheer, naked power.)
Wow.
This stinks to high hell.
Cop commits a felony.
Other cops show up and try to intimidate the witness and/or destroy evidence.
IA appears to be running defense for the cops.
Can’t wait to see if Philly will administer Chicago-style justice.
This cop clearly needs to be in prison.
Why isn’t the cop in jail on felony menacing charges, assault, abuse of power, filing a false report, filing false charges, etc.???
And cops wonder why the public is against them.
OK, give me a word that would commonly mean a system of governance under which a “nobility” would have control of all resources including land, energy, food, weapons,
and the “peasants” live and die at the whims of “nobles”.
And don’t use terms that weren’t invented yet in the times when this was the norm.
They will be here. It may take three or four responses for them to get here, but they will be here. Saying how the girl[s] deserved what they got, how brave the officer was and more of the same.
You gotta admire that Lawless chic. She wasn’t taking any crap. I’d like to see what she looks like.
Jest call me Xena!
So I wonder....how many cops think/feel the store clerk is the bad guy?
Do they(JBT’s) think/feel the clerk needs more attention?
How many(non JBT’s) think/feel the clerk will get ‘more attention’?
My experience leads to me believe the clerk may want to relocate...or he can hang out and let the obviously corrupt Philly cops have there way with him....
Just say’n...
In 20 plus years of traveling to that city I have never seen “Brotherly Love”....thankfully I don’t have to go there anymore.
And all the other cops who tried to get the store owner to erase the tape, they need to be charged with the crime of trying to destroy evidence and they lose their jobs.
This sounds rougher than what OJ did to get (practically speaking) life in prison.
video link at post #19.
I think your use of the word fit very well.
Think if a private security guard anywhere in America acted like this cop. He would be out on his butt in a heartbeat. Yet, police are civil servants and thus, difficult to fire even when they abuse their power, act like jack booted thugs, and it all gets recorded on video.
Because of their power, abuse by the police is all the more egregious. This government employee not only deserves termination, but possible jail time. Yet, as usual, the government is unaccountable.
Now, most police officers are honest, hardworking, and do their jobs to the best of their ability. But some are not and it’s difficult to get rid of them as this story illustrates.
Can’t you just wait until the same permissiveness toward callousness comes to a doctor or nurse near you? Or how about the green coated energy inspectors?
Call your Congress Critters an oppose Obama’s socialized medicine and his cap & tax.
Shouldn’t the cop’s son be charged with assault? He is not a cop, yet he assaulted the young woman.
You only get put in prison for that if you are protecting the Southern Border.
I wonder what their defense will be in backing up the cops who tried to get the store owner to erase the security tape? How can they justify that? I would like to see them even try, if they dare!
Do you actually need to pull the trigger before “Assault with a deadly weapon’ is a concern?
Placing the barrel of a gun into somebody’s neck is “assault’.
The weapon is certainly “deadly”.
Sadly, I don’t exepct much to come of this.
Its Philly, the rule of law doesn’t matter there. And thanks to the idiots of PA putting the mafia man fat Eddie in Harrisburg, it doesn’t matter there now either.
She is beautiful looking.
In Philly? No way, no DA there has the balls to take on the corrpution in the Police and City hall, especially for some poor schmuck with no money or connections.
There are plenty of systems where “nobles” control the things you mentioned:
1. Soviet or Chinese communism. The nomenklatura class controls all these things. Everyone else is peasant.
2. State capitalism, e.g., in Nazi Germany
3. bureaucratic welfare state capitalism—what we have incrementally been living under since the Progressives of the early 1900s or perhaps FDR. But it’s not quite as bad, yet, as under the USSR or National Socialism.
4. Ancien Regime absolutist mercantilism (1600s, 1700s)
5. Ancient imperial Rome
See, you’re hung up on “nobles.” There has always been a group of powerful owners of resources. They are called nobles in the Middle Ages and so you think that that’s the only time a “nobility” has controlled these resources.
But the nomenklatura class of the USSR or the Wall-Strett-White-House axis of the present administration are also forms of noble rule.
But within systems of “rule by elites” (which is really what “nobles” means), you can have immense variation, both in the degree to which the elites own all these resources and the degree of impunity with which they govern.
All I’m saying is that on the scale of impunity, thuggishness and totality of control of resources, the worst regimes have all been post-1500, not pre-1500.
Peasants had rights and recourse to law for redress of their rights. You had not rights, to speak of, under Henry VIII in England. You could be condemned without trial, either condemned to death or to property confiscation or whatever. If you were one of the abosolute monarch’s cronies you were fine, as long as you propped up the absolute monarch.
That was not true in the Middle Ages. Real checks on the power of the king by the nobles and bishops and on the power of bishops and nobles by the kings existed. Were they perfect? No. The system of checks and balances established by the American founders was as good as it gets.
But notice what’s happening: the older check and balance system (nobles and bishops checking kings, kings checking nobles and bishops) failed because of a combination of corruption (non-virtuous rulers at all levels) and greedy power-grabbing by the kings who managed to reduce/eliminate the nobles/bishops as checks on their power.
In reaction to that, the middle class overthrew the absolute kings and decided not to trust in feudum, in personal honor alone but to put trust in a written constitution.
It worked pretty well, as long as those entrused in governing under it were honorable and virtuous, as the Founders were truly honorable and virtuous. But eventually, as we shifted from honor and virtue as key qualifications for the “nobles” (and yes, we had our elites, our Nobles throughout American history, from Washington, Jefferson down through Lincoln) to technical prowess and “value-neutral” “problem-solving” (FDR’s Brain Trust marks the shift)as the key, we handed ourselves over to the bureaucratic state.
We’d be better off with feudum as the key to government than with cleverness and technocratic prowess.
Just something to think about before you throw around “feudal” or “medieval” as cheap descriptions for whatever you despise about the present.
Our problem is not that we have elites governing us. There’s no way to avoid that. Even if you manage to distribute land and wealth among small stake-holders (which was the key to American virtue from the 1600s to the late 1800s), you will still have elites (nobles) among that relatively more widely distributed ownership of resources. Likewise, you can have relatively more concentrated ownership of resources and still have relatively virtuous elites governing. Or you can have concentration of resource ownership and have unvirtuous, thuggish, evil elites governing.
Our problem is lack of honor, lack of virtue among our governing elites, which is directly traceable to the abandoning of Judaeo-Christian virtue in the formation of new generations. We went from “what’s right” to “what works” as the criterion of evaluation.
In the much-maligned pre-1500 Middle Ages, they did still ask, “what is right?” not merely “what works?”
Clearly, this man was deeply unqualified for this position and awarded it only to fill a quota. I can only imagine the stress and suffering he must endure every day in a job clearly beyond his capacity.
Yeah; my heart bleeds for the cowardly SOB. They certainly shouldn't punishment any more than firing his ass, and sending him away for a few years, along with his punk son.
And the article says they declined to prosecute the cop and he was given his gun again!
That JBT ought to get in trouble fore pushing those other two guys around, as well.
America is no longer a free country. The KGB, or maybe Stasi, is firmly entrenched in the guise of our "police force".
Fixed it.
This girl was white, the cop and his son were Messican.
If anyone ever wonders why blacks hate cops, consider how more frequently blacks are abused by cops AND consider how often there is no recourse against the Ubermensch in the blue uniform.
In this case, Mr. Ubermensch, and his uniformed friends, illegally assaulted a female, falsified a report, under color of law attempted to compel a witness to lie, illegally jailed the victim to force her to change her story, ad nauseam.
The DA and the “Internal Investigation Board both whitewashed the case. Mr. Ubermensch in back on hte street, once again the “Armed & Dangerous” stalk the streets, uniformed and above any law, and do it on our tax dollars.
Remember this well:
The reason such behavior is condoned is to condition the public to the abuses of a police state. Whether a white girl in a convenience store who was rear ended by a cop’s son or a black abused by the cops - both are used to condition the public to accept the increasing tyranny of a socialist government.
You babble. Honorable soldiers, honorable police officers, honorable teachers, honorable governors, honorable mothers and honorable fathers know the difference between abuse of power and honorably exercised power.
Take your cheap, anarchic shots. People like you are the problem. Here we have a clear example of abuse of power you you take a shotgun blast at all exercise of power.
It’s the hard work of distinguishing between abuse of power and honorable exercise of power (which all mothers, fathers, policement, soldiers, business owners have to exercise) that makes a society healthy.
Office Lopez abused power. Some others covered for him. He deserves to have the book thrown at him. But only if it is possible for honorable police officials to do that, honestly and honorably, can proper law enforcement take place.
It was the same in the particular period when “feudum” was the label. I’m a hell of a lot more hardheaded and unomantic about it than you are. You are the romantic because you limpwristedly wave your hand at the problem instead of analyzing it.
I want honor and loyalty and virtue and decency in my government today and I have studied carefully how this has and has not functioned under various systems of political and social and economic organization in the past. And among the worst of those systems are a number of the post-1500s systems. One of the best is post-1500 (ours, from 1750-1900 or thereabouts).
But grandiose dismissals like yours are part of the reason we are in the shape we are in. People don’t want to do the hard work of distinguishing the good from the bad. It’s easier to broadbrush.
“I can see if it’s one bad cop but the ones covering up for him are as responsible as the bad ones”.
The rot is nation wide and far too many departments are no longer committed to their oath of office but to their department and their fellow officers.
That they are a bunch of thugs in uniform is, in the end, our fault. The public can remove the Police Chief at each election, or recall him if abuses are too egregious to wait for the next election.
Control your servants or they will control you.
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