By Ira B Robins and Salvatore
E. Rastrelli
Why is “Archangels of Justice”
necessary?
A California Highway Patrolman
beats a woman. The report he wrote about the incident is false and misleading.
The Deputy Chief states that no independent investigation is necessary and that
their Internal Affairs Division has integrity and will do a thorough review of
the case. Exactly who recognized their integrity? Yep! They did. The CHP could
face a large civil lawsuit and the offending officer, who is one of them, could
face criminal charges, but that probably won’t happen. Only independent
investigations, from outside of the departments involved, will get to the truth
of the matter.
• A Milwaukee County Deputy Sheriff ran a stop sign and
seriously injured the woman who had been driving the other car. The Deputy Sheriff
claimed that the woman was at fault. Other deputies charged her with drunk
driving. In a few days The Milwaukee
County Sheriff’s Department found that the woman was not drunk nor under the
influence of drugs and videos of the accident clearly show that the Deputy had
run the stop sign and was at fault. It took almost a year for the charges
against the woman to be dropped. Now the Deputy has filed for complete
disability claiming that he had been injured in the accident. It certainly
looks as if he should be charged with perjury or filing a false report. Sheriff David Clarke has been proactive in
this cover-up.
• The Albuquerque, New Mexico, Police Department has been
actively involved in the wholesale slaughter of 26 people in the past four
years. The Crap Bag District Attorney
has just buried her head in the toilet and allowed this to go on for more than
14 years. Now the United States Department of Justice is involved and working
out a deal to oversee the Department. But if you think they will be charging
any of these police officers you will probably be wrong.
As stain of police misconduct
grows, Council should reopen Cariole Horne pension case
With all the disturbing news
about Buffalo police lately, it’s good to be able to say something positive.
It’s too bad it’s about a brave cop whom the Police Department apparently
mistreated.
Cariol Horne, who is
African-American, was fired in 2008 after she tried to stop a white officer she
said was choking a suspect during an arrest two years earlier. Anyone who
believes that couldn’t have happened hasn’t been following the harrowing tale
of suspended officer Robert E. Eloff who, if reports are correct, was a one-man
crime wave.
The Horne case and issues
surrounding it are a mess, starting with the firing of Horne. Gregory
Kwiatkowski, the officer she says was choking a suspect, won a defamation suit
against Horne and also won a lawsuit filed by the man who was allegedly choked.
Recently, though, Kwiatkowski,
now retired, was indicted on charges that he used unnecessary and excessive
force in connection with a separate incident. That indictment has prompted the
Buffalo Common Council to consider Horne’s request to be granted pension
benefits.
This should be a no-brainer.
There are problems in the Buffalo Police Department, as exemplified by the
Eloff case, the bribing of officers by a tow-truck operator and, also
associated with Eloff, the recently posted video of a gang of officers
attacking and severely beating a man outside a bar on Chippewa Street. No
charges were filed against that man, Christopher J. Kozak, who was not even
arrested; indeed, Eloff later gave him a ride back to his hotel.
In the Horne case, there is
reason to believe the department fired the wrong person. Indeed, commenting on
the raft of brutality reports coming out of the Police Department, Horne noted
that, “If the message they want to give is that an officer is going to be fired
if they stop it, then that’s the wrong message.”
Buffalo needs cops who will
stand up for the law. If Horne had seen a civilian attacking another person, it
would have been her duty to intervene. Why does that change when it’s a police
officer who has crossed a line? Did that happen? The evidence is conflicting,
but Horne and her supporters haven’t wavered; meanwhile, evidence of police
misconduct is mounting.
Horne was fired after 19 years
of service, only one year short of what the state requires to obtain pension
benefits. Without them, she says, she has faced a “really rough” time,
financially, emotionally and physically.
The Common Council should do
what it can to rectify this matter and it should insist that the Police
Department take appropriate steps to deal with a culture that seems to have
given a number of officers reason to believe that they can attack citizens when
they want and for whatever reason they like.
