Baltimore Police Department: To Protect and Serve… themselves
The state scores again:
Baltimore police will no longer release the names of officers who kill or injure people, changing a long-standing practice that the department believes put officers at risk.The decision is prompting criticism from several Baltimore leaders, who said withholding officers’ names will only endanger an already tenuous relationship between the police and the community. Baltimore police shot 21 people last year, 13 of them fatally – the same number killed by police in 2007, when 31 people were shot. Those numbers are up from 2006, when 15 were shot and five killed.
I can’t imagine why the relationship between the cops and the community is so bad!
Manuel’s post also raises the larger question about the nature of police and government. The article also points out that Baltimore’s mayor, Sheila Dixon, is not objecting to this new policy:
A spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon said she will not interfere with the department’s decision.
Not surprisingly, the police union is all in favor of this farce:
The police union applauded the policy change. Robert F. Cherry, president of the Baltimore police union and a former homicide detective, said the department vigorously investigates shootings that involve officers.”If anything, the investigation is more intensive than for the average citizen,” Cherry said. “The only thing the department is doing differently is choosing not to release their name. … I’m surprised we haven’t gone to this earlier.”
My experience in working on the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case tells me that police do not aggressively investigate themselves, and that police are held to much lower standards than are ordinary citizens.
For example, the infamous police shooting in San Francisco has the police urging “caution” and no “rush to judgment,” yet if an ordinary citizen were to shoot an unarmed person in the back at such a close range, the police and press would be denouncing the “execution-style murder” and vowing justice. Instead, we hear the usual claptrap from the authorities.
All of this raises the larger question for me. If a police department is subject to the authority of government, and if government simply is an extension of “the will of the people,” as “Progressives” are fond of telling us, then why do police departments act as a law unto themselves?
The obvious answer is that not only do police officers intimidate everyone else, given they have a license to kill, but they also control a large number of votes and government unions today are major factors in determining elections. All in the name of “progress,” of course.
Sort of like how they don’t release standard operating procedures or the names of officers who break them? Even when the infraction is just using a cell phone?
