Another bad apple in the bunch. The whole tree, farm is rotten.

[tulipsandroses]

ITs the accepted behavior of police brutality that makes the whole farm rotten.

Two years ago, my 19-year-old brother, Anton, was killed by a former Dover police officer. After his death, it was revealed that the officer had 29 use-of-force reports filed against him.

SNIP

Delaware is one of the few states in the nation where officer disciplinary records are only known by police internal affair units. That secrecy enabled Thomas Webster to continue abusing Dover residents during the decade he spent on the force. In 2015, he finally resigned after facing criminal charges for kicking a Black man in the face and breaking his jaw during an arrest.

Webster simply moved across state lines and was hired as an officer in Greensboro, Maryland. That is where the fatal encounter with my brother occurred. Webster responded to a 911 call claiming that Anton kidnapped a 12-year-old boy, who was actually a cousin. Within an hour of crossing paths with Webster and other officers who were handling the call, my brother was dead.

SNIP
Webster never should have gotten a badge in Maryland. His certification would have been denied had the state police training commission known about his history in Dover. Last year, the former Greensboro police chief pleaded guilty to covering up Webster’s record on his application. It would have been much harder to hide this information if Delaware made it public in the first place.

[link:https://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/2021/01/30/honor-anton-black-stop-hiding-police-misconduct-records/4311490001/|

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[patphil]

2. Obviously Webster wasn't just a bad cop, he was a criminally bad cop.

The real problem here is the concealing of his bad behavior in his original state, and then by the former police chief of Greensboro.
Why in the name of heaven would the Greensboro police chief hire someone with such a bad record, and deliberately cover that behavior up on his application?
Didn't the police chief realize that Webster would continue to be a bad cop, and create serious, possibly fatal, incidents in his department?
I would think that former police chief could be charged for aiding and abetting Webster's criminal behavior.
This is exactly why so many people want a complete revision of law enforcement across the whole nation.

Given the huge number of violent, lawless police that seem to be everywhere, I think such a complete redo of policing in America is long overdue.
If the police won't police themselves, then we need to fire them and hire new cops that will.

[secondwind]

3. K&R... soo sorry about your brother, it boggles the mind how

police are killing people right and left, with very little justice being served.

[tulipsandroses]

7. For clarification, this is not my brother

This was written by his sister LaToya Holley - link to her entire opinion piece in the post.

[jaxexpat]

4. It's the non-public, even secretive, nature of the LEO community that will always haunt them.

Imagine a country patrolled by uniformed enforcers where lethal weapons are readily drawn. Then imagine them unaccountable because information proving their every public action is subject to their own internal censorship, pending interpretation.

Until this is overcome, it will always be a "he said, she said" testimony despite the evidence of our own eyes. Their best attempts to be "the good guys" and "for the public good" will remain undermined by this obvious fear of exposure to that same public.

I also got a beef with eternal complaint of the proliferation of gangs terrorizing communities. Seems to me if the cops really wanted to rid neighborhoods of them it wouldn't be that hard. Unless they're complicit. Just saying.

[FakeNoose]

12. Yes, the police unions have been doing this for decades

It's time to defund police unions.

I'm not anti-union, but the police "unions" operate more like a secret mafia.

[Hortensis]

5. One sensible, realistic provision of our George Floyd Justice in Policing Act is to set up

a national registry so that their records follow police officers wherever they try to go.

I'm not an admirer of an enormously dysfunctional and foolish "whole orchard is rotten" position. Destroy the whole orchard and you destroy the apples, even the good ones that should have been saved. There are already plenty of good cops who want to be good and need their forces to be what they are supposed to be. And plenty of others who will be good when required.

Our job is to set our standards higher than we have in the past, for our own communities. And to vote smart for good people.

[Wounded Bear]

6. Police misconduct should be on the public record...

any disciplinary action should be published to every LEO organization in the country.

[uponit7771]

10. +1

[calimary]

8. That's the biggest problem with these officers.

Well, ONE of the biggest problems. That they can just drive a few miles or to the next big city or over state lines and get ANOTHER policing job. That should be a crime going in both directions: misrepresenting so your new bosses won’t know your brutal past, AND hiring a schmuck like that without doing even the most minimal research on him first.

I believe there’s talk now about the increasingly urgent need for a nationwide bad cop registry. Profoundly necessary! A bad cop should not be able to skate away to a new police department in a different state or zip code with impunity, OR immunity, either!

[Joe Nation]

9. The system is rotten to the core

There are no good apples. A good apple wouldn't cover for a rotten apple. And why do we continually refer to them as apples anyway. Let's call them what they are. Crooked cops.

[7wo7rees]

11. If you have 12 bad cops

...and 1,300 good cops who don't weed out and turn in bad cops,
then you have 1312 bad cops.