re: Iberia Parish Sheriff: handcuffed man in cop car shot himself: 8/21 update

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I heard on very good authority, there is a game warden here in LA, that negligently/illegally discharged his AR15, and blew a hole in the roof of his truck.


Nothing happened to him other than a slap on the wrist because of his relationship with some of the higher ups in Baton Rouge...Still got promoted. Its the little things like that IMO that make people wonder WTF else is being swept under the rug.

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You know, If I sold cars and the industry was amok with sketchy salesmen, I would want the industry cleaned up for my own benefit. Law enforcement seems to have some incredible kinship that makes criticism extremely hard to do.

Most probably don't think so, but they've gotta start rebuilding public trust. Examples like the following don't help. LINK

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Not all cops are bad, but the insulation from accountability begins with the departments themselves, which often go out of their way to defend the actions of abusive officers. In some cases, pressure from police unions has kept unruly officers on the job despite the departments' efforts to remove them. Other times, the insulating force is also the first line of officer accountability: Internal Affairs. Often depicted as a hated entity within the force, the Internal Affairs division is supposed to be the public's first line of defense against cops who abuse their power. As documents obtained by the Courier News and Home News Tribune show, dozens of complaints against central New Jersey police officers are dismissed every year without ever making it past these departments' internal review mechanisms.
From 2008 to 2012, citizens filed hundreds of complaints alleging brutality, bias and civil rights violations by officers in more than seven dozen police departments in Central Jersey…

Just 1 percent of all excessive force complaints were sustained by internal affairs units in Central Jersey, the review found. That’s less than the national average of 8 percent, according to a federal Bureau of Justice Statistics report released in 2007

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As Sergio Bachao of My Central Jersey points out, this provides public officers with more protection than it does private citizens. Complaints and disciplinary rulings against licensed professionals in the private sector are posted by the state using these citizens' full names. Obviously, doing so makes these professionals more accountable and provides other members of the public with info they can use to avoid potential scams, etc.

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Except in race cases, complaints against officers and how officers were disciplined — which can range from spoken or written reprimands to suspensions or termination — are kept confidential.

The tallies of complaints and how they were disposed are public records, as are use of force reports, which officers are required to file whenever they use bodily force or weapons to subdue a suspect. The public also has the right to read synopses of all complaints where a fine or suspension of at least 10 days was assessed. But the identities of officers, as well as the complainants, have to be redacted from these documents.

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Also, police have no duty to protect you. Supreme court has made this clear.