Coming soon National Police Reform

National Police Reform

Why is it so hard to prosecute cops?

Time and time again as with the Freddi Gray case, we blame in terms of how we see how things played out and we choose to ignore the realities of how it really did play out.

We are missing a key piece, we see it how we want to see it, we put our personal expectations onto police, through that we determine how cops should behave, how they could have reacted differently. We interject our personal beliefs and feelings into the situation which causes it to become clouded.

So why is it so hard to prosecute a cop?

First, we have to determine whether or not they actually broke any laws and in our most recent case on the books the answer was no. They didn’t even violate any civil rights. Things become so blurry to us because we are truly seeing them differently than a cop does.

Police are trained to view things differently than we do. They are trained to go into certain situations with a preconceived notion or to be on heightened alert. Domestic Violence calls are the best example. They roll to a domestic violence call already on heightened alert not knowing what to expect.

Most of the time they roll up to such calls prepared to mediate, care of the injured and/or take a man into custody because in general it is the man committing the crime. I believe most of you would agree.

And if most of you did agree with that, you just did what everyone assumes cops do all of the time the thing we are constantly condemning them for. It’s easy to do. We all assume that men are the aggressors, which by the way is not always true. But that is a preconceived notion or idea as to what to expect.

Doesn’t matter if the guy is white or black, in general whenever someone says the words Domestic Violence, we associate men to be the aggressors. We have a mental image of a man being the aggressor.  

We all judge others based off of our own beliefs and how we feel that we would personally handle a situation. IF you want to police the police we need to stop blaming, criticizing and pay attention.

Recently, I made an honest attempt to read the book “ Why it’s so tough to prosecute cops” by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who I like and respect but honestly I laughed while trying to get through the book. I literally thought the book was a joke until a friend of mine pointed out it was supposed to be taken seriously.

The gist was that a lot of blame was going around from Police Unions being at fault, to white cops, cops protecting each other, a judicial system that protects bad cops and cops are always saying that they feared for their lives.

Yet at least as far as I read into it, no mention was made that in two of the cases that the book went over, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, the men were not innocent.  THEY WERE BREAKING THE LAW WHEN THEY WERE CONFRONTED BY POLICE!

And Grey wasn’t murdered, shot, run over, shot with a taser, he died in a freak accident. No one meant to cause him harm.

The reason it’s hard for some to take things like cops being racist seriously are that the cases used as examples are jokes. Bring us a case that shows clear racial bias on the part of the cops for instance, white cop always pulls over only African American men, or 3 out of 5 arrests are African American’s while the other 2 are other races or white.  Things like that show a pattern of racial bias.

So it is hard to prosecute a cop because while we all feel entitled to be able to point out how the cops actions were not appropriate we were never in the that cops shoes at the time the incident occurred, not to the mention the crucial key is whether or not a cop broke any laws. Not civil rights but laws.

Take the shooting in Miami a few weeks ago, yes you all know the one. The cop who shot an unarmed therapist who was lying on the ground with his hands up?

The issue I have with it,  we only see part of the video, part of the story. So it’s more convenient for us to sit around and say that he never should have fired his weapon. We too often judge others based off of how we ourselves would have handled things, you know in the perfect world.

The video doesn’t actually show the therapist being shot. The officer who shot the therapist has since then come out and admitted that it was an accident and according to one media outlet also made a statement that he did what he had to do. His union if that is true, should have walked away and left him in the dog house over that.

Still the same, proving that he broke any laws will be difficult because he most likely didn’t break any laws whatsoever. Did he have to shoot someone? We don’t know that answer, we’d like to say that he shouldn't have shot anyone but we would be basing that off of our own personal beliefs.

Those beliefs do not mean that any laws were broken. Cops are trained to handle situations differently than you or I. We might pause in a situation because we want to better think it through where cops are not really afforded that opportunity, that pause could mean the cop ends up hurt or worse, dead.

Cops are trained to think and make a judgment call sometimes within the blink of an eye, if you or I were in the same situation we might be badly injured or dead ourselves because we handled the situation the way we normally would.

Prosecuting cops isn’t easy because it’s not meant to be. So in order to change that, we would have to lobby for changes in policing and policing policies. We’d have to lobby for change in how the judicial system is setup to hear cases involving police but well before that, you would have to lobby for changes in terms of who oversees police misconduct within the communities you want to see change in.

Some of what’s out and about throughout the US isn’t working, Oakland, CA and Portland, OR are two examples of oversight already not working, not to mention that when the DOJ becomes involved and departments are ordered to change and bring in oversight, it’s costly for the taxpayer who have to pay for the misdeeds of that department.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, lobby to have grants cut from police departments who are not playing well with the citizens of the community and you’ll see change a hell of a lot faster than you will if you are waiting on the Feds.

Cut the funding and you might just see a change in how police react to everyone’s cries for police reform.

We just have to be able to meet them halfway and work together for the changes everyone seeks.

Cristal M Clark

@thecrimeshop

IOS users can find The Crime Shop on Apple News

Oakland Police officer commits suicide

Live together, Die Alone

In the wake of Brendan O’Brien’s suicide the Oakland Police bureau has been rocked by multiple scandals involving its police officers. His death seems to have lifted that long dark curtain of police corruption that has been allowed to run rampant and out of control.

Brendan O’Brien took his life 9/25/2015. He was found by his mother, he had shot himself in the head. The inside of his right arm bore the tattoo “Live Together, Die Alone.” Something he clearly lived by until the end.

It was never a question to investigators as to whether or not Brendan committed suicide, it was more a matter of why. That why was because he had been having an affair with a young woman, who at the time the affair began would have been underage.

The young woman who was 18 at the time of his death, met him while underage working the streets as a prostitute and that by legal definition, in and of itself made her a victim of child sex trafficking.

Brendan saved her from a pimp when she was just 17 and they began a relationship, one that was sexual in a nature and it was no longer a secret at the time of his death. He stood to lose his job over it should the accusations be proven true, additionally, it also would mean that he broke the very laws he was to have been enforcing during his time employed as a police officer.

Investigators did find proof of this young woman's sexual relationship with Brendan, they also found insurmountable proof that she had relationships with 28 other officers. Over a dozen from Oakland, the rest are from Richmond, Alameda County, Livermore and Contra Costa County.

Interestingly, a year and 3 months prior to Brendan’s suicide police were at his home to investigate the death of his wife. She was found with a gunshot wound to the right side of her head.

Her death was ruled a suicide, however some of the evidence paints a much different picture and her family does not believe that she committed suicide.

In fact it has been reported that after Brendan’s suicide, someone pushed the federal monitor and the compliance director to investigate and examine everything further so as to ensure that Brendan’s wife did in fact commit suicide and that the police were not guilty of some sort of cover up.

A US district Judge was notified by Compliance director Robert Warshaw that he found irregularities and potential violations with regards to an old negotiation settlement agreement that the Oakland police were supposed to have been following because of an entirely different case involving the department. He discovered this while he was investigating the death of Brendan’s wife.

That agreement required the department to report to the monitor in what is reported to be, “a matter of days” any matter involving an internal investigation. The monitor was never notified of any sexual misconduct allegations involving the now 18 year old female and 28 officers. The department's internal investigation had been going on for 6 months before the monitor got wind of it.

This sex scandal however, it goes from the top brass, down the through the ranks of the Oakland Police department.

When a Federal Judge ordered that the internal investigation be taken over by the Federal Monitor on 3/23/16, one could see a huge difference in how things were being handled.

It was at that point that officers were being walked out of the building. Several suspensions have occurred and a couple of resignations came about.

In the 6 months that Oakland handled the investigation, not a damn thing happened.

And that, is the mob mentality that the public refers to when calling out police departments as a whole. The inability to be accountable, hold your fellow officer accountable and do something when something needs to be done. The cops who are breaking the law both on and off duty while the department ignores it, well it's never a good thing to be doing in this day and age...

While police departments don’t much care for federal oversight, it is a necessary evil at times. Sometimes, the cop mentality runs through the entire department and it can truly be thicker than blood and water.

All cops see each other as family, like the rest of us might, we would do anything to protect our own.

They live it, breath it and are it.

And in the case of this young woman, multiple cops from several agencies exploited her, they acted in inappropriate ways, they became predictors, they became the very thing they spend every day at work trying to get off of the streets.

Together, many covered it up by ignoring it, not investigating it and kicking it under a carpet of lies and deceit.

Live Together, Die Alone.

The error most often made:

Police are built up mentally, they are made to believe that they are above us somehow, they cannot and do not make the mistakes the rest of us do, they cannot and will not behave like the rest of us because of the profession they have chosen. Some of you refer to it as the “cop mentality.”

Whatever you choose to call it, it is unfortunately, virtually impossible to be factual because one critical factor still remains, they are human beings and human nature after all, is so very predictable.

It cannot be changed, no matter who you are or what your profession is.

Hence, the police are no different than the rest of us. They just do a better job of hiding it than most of us and when they fall, they tend to fall much harder than the rest of us.

The fall from grace for a cop is much harder than a fall from grace is for the rest of us. By default that is because of the very pedestal we choose to put them on. 

The mental trauma is overwhelming for them which can bring about even worse behavior, breaking the law, lying, cheating, murder and of course suicide.

They will go to incredible lengths to break that fall. Which they can’t, because it is always inevitable.

Whenever we look back at cases where good cops fell from grace so publicly, you can always see them when they begin to slip and it all starts with a lie, something they have done and the lie they tried to tell in an effort to cover it up.

In the case of officer Brendan O’Brien, his fall began when he started his affair with a 17 year old girl, he began to spiral with the death of his wife and it ended when he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

Cristal M Clark

Tweet me @thecrimeshop

IOS users can find The Crime Shop on Apple News

https://crimeshop.wordpress.com