Honestly, I am not completely for sure he was in uniform, there are too many mixed reports on this. This is a very important detail that needs to be clarified.
Both my Father and my Uncle were Officers. They saw it coming to this years ago and got out. They saw incompetent wrongs that they couldn’t do anything about, their hands were tied, The “he is going to cause us all trouble” warnings and observations were completely ignored.
Unfortunately, the very same thing they were worried about is now happening. When all the good pickles in the barrel turn their heads, ignore, and don’t point out those very few bad pickles, the whole barrel eventually ends up being tainted. Then that one tainted barrel becomes representative of every barrel of pickles, rotten or not.
Before these events will stop happening, the police are going to have to start policing themselves first. It is actually in their own best interests to do this in house discretely rather than to have it become a huge public event like this.
Risks and liabilities should be very serious issues to consider as a first priority. Continuing to be blind to problems is not working.
We had that problem in our department as well.
There were always guys that you just knew where going to be a problem. Unfortunately, the city didn’t do anything during the probationary period when they could. The union wouldn’t do anything because..it’s a dues paying member. The only recourse for the line troops was to “bury” the person in a inside job or in a district where the risk to people was limited.
It wasn’t until the end of my career that the department started using FTO’s that could make recommendations during the probationary period about the unsuitability of certain officers. Then it was up to the administration and the city to address the problem. Sometimes they did, sometimes not.