172 Comments
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Tosca's avatar

There's an Australian cop currently facing a whole raft of charges, over the death of a 95year old nursing home patient with dementia. She had a steak knife and a walker. He said "Nah, bugger it" and tazed her.

Even the police union wants nothing to do with his sociopathic arse. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/na-bugger-it-confronting-police-statement-of-95-year-olds-tasering-released/04i5srw2m

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Teddy Barnes's avatar

Again.....what was the underlying crime? Is driving the wrong way down a one-way street a capital offense? FUCK THIS GUY......

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Thatsit Fortheotherwon's avatar

Nice. Spent a couple summers near there when I was a kid.

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Wookiee Monster's avatar

Wookiee’s law of police officers: the less suitable someone is to have a badge and a gun, the more they want one.

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Boojum's avatar

The cop was obviously afraid he would be the victim of a drive by knifing.

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Bel-Ami's avatar

Not "just a few bad apples"- as I keep pointing out.

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rodger coghlan's avatar

The entire quote includes the words 'spoils the barrel' - I never understood why people do not understand what the full quote means and how it applies to the police

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rodger coghlan's avatar

Damn it! How did my real name appear (er, who the fuck is rodger?)

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Daniel O'Riordan's avatar

Rodger? Rodger Coghlan? You old so-and-so. I haven't seen you since high school. Go Beavers!

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skinnercitycyclist's avatar

Beavers? Don't they just play with themselves these days?

Pac-12, RIP

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el duderino's avatar

Godddammitsomuch

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aureolamanita's avatar

"Your Honor, my client was simply defending himself from a man who has a life-long history of aggressive and remorseless melanism."

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oscarphile's avatar

Wait, wait, don't tell me, let me guess:

Irizarry "was no angel," right? Did I guess correctly?

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Crip Dyke's avatar

I read that a number of officers greater than one testified to this lunging bullshit and other lies.

I hope every single one of them is being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. No mercy for cops engaged in conspiracy.

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Michael Bowen's avatar

It should be noted that Philadelphia, like Boston and lower Manhattan, are pre-grid cities with lots of narrow streets that follow one-way patterns that are not predictable, so one can easily make a mistake and turn down a street the wrong way. I'm just amazed that he could find a space where he could have pulled over.

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randomnessliz's avatar

Kensington

yikes!

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Kay Ducky's avatar

Plus, the nervous situation of being brown and getting pulled over by police who, shock of shocks, like to murder people that look like you.

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Fifth Dentist's avatar

How many people were murdered before body cams?

If not for that footage, the cop's official story would have been it, and the entire department would have rallied around the poor officer who had to make that unfortunate life-and-death decision in the line of protecting you, the public, from, um, dark-skinned dudes who are bad drivers.

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carovee's avatar

Since so few body cam footage results in any kind of real consequences, probably the same number.

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Dorothea is a Democrat's avatar

I'm sure we will all roast like chicken before this happens, but I'll throw it out there again. No policemen need a gun to hand out an illegal left turn ticket. In fact, they don't even have to pull that person over. They can send them a ticket in the mail along with the video footage of them breaking the traffic law. If they are pursuing a vehicle that is stolen or a car driven by somebody wanted by the police, then by all means carry a taser or a gun. This isn't hard. The police have always used mild infractions as an excuse to abuse citizens. Don't give them the opportunity anymore.

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Satanic Pancake's avatar

Most cops probably shouldn't even be armed with Nerf guns.

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Eric Paul Jacobsen's avatar

'The problem for Dial is that the officers’ body camera footage debunks their convenient fiction. Police officials admitted two days after Irizarry was killed that he was still in the car when Dial shot him. There was no lunging. As Larry Krasner, the Philadelphia district attorney, said at a Friday news conference, “The videos speak for themselves.” '

*** *** ***

As long as hand-held video recording devices still outnumber hand-held firearms, there is hope for us.

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meh's avatar

My take is kinda harsh: Cops who engage in this kind of behavior - essentially, murdering a civilian and then trying to cover it up - should automatically be charged with capital murder with aggravating circumstances - the DA should get zero discretion.

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BecomingJenn's avatar

yup, my feeling as well. worked in a morgue where we had to clean up and catalogue every bullet, every exit & entry wound after an officer involved shooting. The anger so many of us had who had to clean up after their mess, who had to physically document & retrieve every damn bullet and yet contain our rage and take care of the SOB IAB officers who turned green and couldn't even stomach the aftereffect of what they DID, yeah, I got nothing but curses for the 'thin blue line' of narcissists mofos whose only idea of 'serve & protect' was protecting their own MFing asses. Who in the fork were they 'serving & protecting' on ANY shooting. So yeah, I totally agree. I mean they HAD the training. What/WHY did they let their emotions get such control they MURDERED someone? That they couldn't contain their fear for that time that the came out shooting? YOU (the cops that is ) were TRAINED to know better. While I give exceptions to those who didn't know better, cops don't have that plausible deniability and so yeah, I consider it 1st degree and all that it implies. I do think there ARE laws on the book to state as such(higher sentence standard for cops who abuse their powers), but rarely enforced.

Hmm, didn't realize how angry I was. Awoke this morning with memories of the morgue and it's usually not a good sign when that happens. So yeah...

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meh's avatar

I spent a dozen years working with cops as a client-facing tech for a dispatch-and-records software vertical, working with thousands of LEO/Fire/EMT clients.

Fire and EMT I would mostly work with again without too many reservations, but I got out bc I got sick of LEO behavior.

The people assigned to be sysadmins - e.g., my counterparts on the agency side - were often LEOs who were injured or on leave or under investigation, so I got to see an interesting cross-section. They would ALL fsck up, not pay attention to what I taught them or the runbooks they were given to maintain critical system uptime, and then lie about it with straight faces.

For a group of people nominally charged with upholding the rule of law, they almost universally had less respect for it than any other group I've ever worked with.

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BecomingJenn's avatar

EXACTLY what you said. Yeah, never want to work with cops again. Cop type peeps don't know how to follow simple instructions & think they know everything when they don't know shit. Hence why we morgue peeps were upset cuz the IAB person got green & had a bout of syncope as soon as we opened the body cavity. We even asked, and he said 'I can handle this, I'm not a p---y'. That was seconds before he turned green & had to be escorted out of the autopsy suite for his own safety. so yeah

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