Bad Cops Get Off in Court

In two recent court trials, policemen who were charged with wrongdoing got off essentially scot-free.

One was the case where, in a video seen all over the country, a big, heavy Chicago policeman named Anthony Abbate allegedly beat up a female bartender half his weight when she refused to serve him any more drinks. In his trial, which was as I guess a couple of months ago, the cop got off on a legal technicality such that the core of the prosecution's case was thrown out.

Very recently another policeman also got off scot-free. This policeman, it was alleged, had been driving drunk and had a crash in which his vehicle hit another and the two occupants of the latter vehicle were killed.

I have to admit here that I might be a bit fuzzy on the facts, but it seems there was conflicting testimony as to whether this cop was drunk. Very strangely, his blood alcohol didn't get tested for seven or eight hours after the crash. On the other hand, there was video showing him in the bar.

This cop also tried to walk away from the crash--right down an expressway off-ramp--instead of staying at the scene (as is, in fact, required by law in the case of such an accident) to have his testimony taken. The relatives of the two young men who were killed are crying that justice was not done, and here I certainly agree with them.

It seems to me (and I wish I had some statistics on this) that policemen seldom get convicted. Or if they are found guilty, they get probation or a suspended sentence--in other words, nothing more than a basically meaningless slap on the wrist.

It seems to be hard to convict a cop. It's proverbial that cops support one another and almost never testify against one another. In the two cases above, it was the judges' rulings as to admissibility of evidence (or, rather, the lack thereof) that pulled the rug out from under the prosecutors' cases. So I wonder if the judges are impartial or biased in favor of the cops. If they are not predisposed to believe only the best of the police, they may cave in to pressure--from the police union, from the police commissioner, from politicians such as the mayor. None of these parties seems to want to own up that the police ever do any wrong.

The danger is that, whenever a cop escapes punishment for his wrong actions, that makes other cops feel invincible and convinces them that, whatever they do, they] need never worry about any consequences of their actions.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein