This is not one “bad apple” or “rogue,” this is the entire NYPD union lining up to officially state that prosecuting cops for breaking the law is ipso facto unacceptable:
Can anyone keep defending cops when this is how they behave?
Yup, cops pretty much assuming they have carte blanch to ignore the law. Not surprising. What does surprise me is the sheer openness of it.
This shit makes my blood boil.
What’s really depressing is that, as the John Jay College professor interviewed for the article said, an angry police force is a recipe for further problems, because officers have the opportunity and in some cases the inclination to take out their frustrations on the community that they are policing.
“During the investigation, overseen by the Bronx district attorney’s office, prosecutors found fixing tickets to be so extensive that they considered charging the union under the state racketeering law as a criminal enterprise, the tactic employed against organized crime families.”
That pretty much sums it up right there.
Well, why the fuck didn’t they go for it?! If it had been ANY other group, thy would have.
Bad apples, my ass. It’s the cops who aren’t crooked that are a rarity.
Welcome to New York.
Damn it.
Well Scott Walker, I guess I now agree there’s at least one union chapter that needs it’s collective bargaining eliminated.
And this is the same police department that has claimed it has the wherewithal to shoot down an airplane if they took a notion to!
This is one bunch of cops that needs to be kept very happy and contented!
They actually had the sheer temerity and gall to parade around with signs proclaiming “Just Following Orders”??!?
Yeah, that went over very well in the Nuremberg Trials.* He who does not remember the past is doomed to repeat it. And fail his history classes in the meanwhile.
[*To be clear, not drawing a parallel to the crimes in question, alleged or not, just the excuse.]
Then it’s time for the investigation to work it’s way up the chain of command.
This isn’t a cop problem at all really (other than that they express their position in more vulgar blue collar ways).
This is a union problem.
All unions are incipient rackets.
All unions rush to the defense of union or union-friendly miscreants, and have no concern about the horrible public perception this creates. The whole point of militant unionism is to say “F you, general public, we got ours and we’re not letting go of it.” The whole point is to negotiate contracts where behavior like this can’t and won’t be punished (don’t hold your breath waiting for a single one of those cops to be disciplined for openly advocating illegal activity, policy manual be damned).
This is no different, not one bit different, from teachers unionists encouraging their members to pray for Chris Christie to die.
Modern union=thugs, likely continuing criminal enterprise. Nothing else to see here, move along.
Yup, no difference between drug running, assault, intimidation, etc. and teachers clinging to pensions.
I’m no fan of most unions, but your post is idiotic. Police have an order of magnitude more power. That changes everything.
Difference in degree, not really in kind.
As for idiotic, the superior power the police have is derived from their weapons and ability to arrest people. In this specific instance of union thuggery, though, they weren’t threatening to shoot the prosecutor for indicting the dirty cops, or threatening to arrest the welfare recipients who chanted anti-cop sentiments. They were rallying to defiantly protest proper discipline being applied to their fellow union member miscreants, and to do their best to shield them from any liability or embarrassment for their misdeeds. In short, exactly what the teachers unions do when they oppose discipline for teachers molesting students, shout death threats about a governor who tries to constrain their consequence-free status, demand contracts where criminal or inept teachers are paid indefinitely to do nothing in rubber rooms.
Yep, basically the same thuggish behavior patterns. The fact that the likes of the teamsters and their vowel-friendly affiliates actually take it further and break legs is, again, where the difference of degree, not kind, comes in.
Police forces were corrupt long before they were unionized. Let’s not kid ourselves.
There was a recent article in the Denver Post that said the new policy of the DPD was to notify supervisors first when they pulled over a cop for drinking & driving.
You’d think a DUI was a DUI, but apprently not.
No.
I’ll wait for you to prove your case.
I have to wonder how a union fixes parking tickets.
No. While you might find it offensive, unions, and individual members thereof, have every legal right to pray for anyone to die. In this case, the union blatantly argues they should be able to break the law. Huge difference.
The union argues that its members should be able to fix tickets without legal consequence. Since the union is comprised of police officers, this is a distinction without a difference.
I gotta say, I love their choice of defence. “Oh come on, what’s the big deal ? We’ve been doing this for ages”. That’s some tone deafness and/or chutzpah.
Pfft. Anyone who thinks this attitude of “we’re above it” is unique is just naive.
I have a friend who’s son is an officer in the CT state police. The step-father told us a story of being stopped for speeding on the interstate by a state cop (CT is notorious for being hard-ass on speeders). He had been given a “business card” from his stepson (along with all the other family members) stating that he was related to a CT State Police officer, but felt awkward (and somewhat ashamed since he had actually been speeding) handing it to the officer when he handed over his license. But then, thinking about it while the officer was doing whatever they do in the patrol car, he decided to show the card to the officer when he returned with the paperwork, at which point he was lectured quite aggressively by the officer who informed him that he should always show the card immediately upon being stopped because now his information had already been radioed in and the officer was obliged to write the ticket.
So I guess it’s perfectly okay to break some laws providing you are, or are related to, a police officer, at least in CT, and I’d venture to guess pretty much everywhere else too. (although perhaps other places aren’t sophisticated enough to print out “official” cards indicating such)
*I saw the card. If I remember correctly, it said something along the lines of “this person is related to Officer ____. Please extend him/her the same courtesy that you would extend to me.” (not the exact wording I’m sure, but that’s the gist of it)
I kind of find this whole “scandal” amusing. Is there actually anybody who is surprised to hear that police officers may have “fixed” a few tickets for friends and family? It’s not like this is some sort of super secret clandestine operation involving Tactical Turtlenecks and people crawling through the air ducts. It’s a cop talking to another cop, talking to a clerk, who says “sure, it’s gone.” It’s something that’s been known forever, anybody in or around the department HAS to know it was going on, so it’s a bit ridiculous to “blow the lid off” the scandal and start charging officers with crimes.
Nobody needs to go to jail over fixing a ticket, what you do is stop the process now, make it well communicated that it is never to happen again, and put the hammer down on anyone violating the rule. If coverups involve actual criminal behavior, by all means lay down charges.
The other reality is that police have discretion in the field, if you’re pulled over for speeding, you are not guaranteed a ticket. The officer has discretion and can let you off with a warning. Thus, being human, they give friends, family, other officers more discretion than the population at large. I’d like that discretion to be less than 100% warnings, but I don’t know how you do that without eliminating discretion entirely.