Local Colorado officials have reached an $8.5 million settlement with a woman who was hospitalized in 2022 after being left handcuffed in a police SUV that was then hit by a train.
The city of Fort Lupton and town of Platteville, Colorado, agreed on the settlement with the victim, Yareni Rios-Gonzalez, according to a release from the Fort Lupton Police Department. The settlement amount will be split equally between the town and city and paid by their insurers, according to attorney Eric M. Ziporin, whose office represents the city.
Rios, who was a suspect in a road rage case, survived the September 2022 collision but suffered nine broken ribs, a broken arm and other injuries.
It’s awesome we are finally holding the police financially liable for their actions. My bad, it’s the taxpayers again.
You want change? Demand police accountability.
Police aren’t civilians and they aren’t workers. Abolish their “union” as well as Qualified Immunity. They can earn the right to not be prosecuted while doing their job…
Police are supposed to be civilians. The whole idea of America avoiding mitary dictatorship was vested in the Army being under the control of the Commander in Chief (a civilian chosen by civilians), In conjunction with the police force being comprised of civilians, otherwise that force is just a military with a different name. You can make the argument they’re above civilians in current times but this is by no mean integral to american policing, and is in fact antithetical to the American idea of police.
Don’t get me wrong I still think they’re problematic even in the theoretical best case scenario, but they’re definitely civilians. Know you enemy, know them well.
I’m not an expert on the origins of police in the US, but I thought their origin story was basically to oppress the civilian population to protect corporate property.
Like, their entire purpose and why they were given authority was so that they could beat down civilians in the name of corporate profits. Which is the opposite of what you’re claiming.
How are those contradictory? Can a civilian force not shakedown people to protect property?
Or are you asking me why they made a theoretical safety on the idea of policing instead of just telling everyone ‘Hey these are going to be our new chosen opressors, have fun!’
How are those contradictory? Can a civilian force not shakedown people to protect property?
I think the idea is that civilian force has governmental protections that other civilians would otherwise never have.
Qualified immunity started in 1967. These protections aren’t inherent to policing, they’ve been slowly added on over time.
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Or take settlement money out of police pension funds.
Police absolutely ARE CIVILIANS
The problem is police aren’t treated like civilians.
Oxford Languages definition:
civilian:
noun
a person not in the armed services or the police force.
I’m obviously using the term in a non-military context as the topic is policing, not military or international conflict.
Where’s Oxford again? American policing is based on the fact that a civilian force polices a civilian body. Its part of the tools to avoid military dictatorship, the same way the President is a civilian chosen by the people to be the Commander in Chief of the military.
Marriam-webster:
- one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force
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Cool now tell me what common parlance has to do with the legal classification of police officers? (Hint: legally cops are civilians and dictionaries dont supercede the law)
Goalpost shifted
Civilians don’t get free passes on murder, torture, intimidation, false evidence, etc etc etc.
So many people are anti-union but when it comes to the police union they’re oddly silent…
Friend’s mom frequently complained about unions - any union - because she heard people complaining on Fox or at work. She was a 20-year member of the police union (not as an officer). And bragged about that too.
He could never convince her of the mental disconnect there.
Like who?
Who is anti-union? Let me introduce you to the history of union busting in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States?wprov=sfla1
They are literally above the law. So again, not civilians. That’s the difference. They aren’t a real union because it’s not workers banding together.
Cops don’t have qualified immunity in Colorado
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30 months of probation?! That’s basically a slap on the wrist. That’s not accountability, that’s doing the absolute minimum to make it LOOK like “see, we’re accountable!”. Dude handcuffed a person in a car on railroad tracks.
And 100 hours of public service… you mean like his job?
Take some overtime and sleep in a cruiser, he’ll have it done in two weeks anyway.
Did you read the post you replied to? They said financially liable. Read through the quote you responded with and tell us where they are held financially liable. They are (rightfully) mad that it’s the taxpayers that are effectively paying out the settlement instead of the police force.
The settlement amount will be split equally between the town and city and paid by their insurers, according to attorney Eric M. Ziporin, whose office represents the city.
Perhaps you should read it.
paid by their insurersOh, whew, at least it’s not the tax payers! You really got 'im with your crafty reading of the article.Edit: naw, I fucked up. My apologies. Carry on.
Is this sarcasm? I’m not sure.
Insurance is not free, you pay for it, if you have a claim your premiums go up.
Insurance companies don’t exist because of goodwill, they exist for profit.
edited.
No worries, thanks
I guess that’s technically accountability. Doesn’t sound like much of a punishment.
And this is damn near a unicorn. (and likely would have been swept under the rug without cam footage - just like every other case where cops see justice) Just like one black president didn’t signal the end of racism, a small percentage of cases where someone OTHER THAN taxpayers are on the hook for police misbehavior doesn’t signal the end of a need for reform, it signals a nearly imperceptible change to the status quo. I’m grateful for the change, but it’s barely a start.
The weird thing is this cop didn’t put the suspect in her own car, but another officer’s car who had parked on the tracks.
First off, what kind of fucking moron parks their car on fucking train tracks? Holy shit, that guy should have been punished as much as the officer who put the suspect in the car just for being so goddamn stupid.
Secondly, the cop should have noticed that the car she put the suspect in was on the tracks. She probably assumed the car was a safe place to put a person, since you would think nobody would be so stupid as to park on the tracks.
First off, what kind of fucking moron parks their car on fucking train tracks?
A cop that wants to execute someone via train.
Oh, no. They were just idiots in this case. If they want to really hurt you, they’ll, just force an EMT to administer a lethal dose of ketamine, or break an old woman’s arm over a petty theft from a walmart and then leave her wounded and untreated in jail for hours, or shoot an unarmed kid that called 911 because he was tripping on too many drugs and needed help. (All things that have happened in the area in the last few years.)
The cop who parked there isn’t the cop who put the suspect in the car.
so what ? there being more than one cop means that there was multiple cops that should have been smarter.
multiple cops being there makes it look more like an attempt to kill the woman.
Look, I hate cops as much as the next rational person, but this does not at all look like an attempt to kill the woman. That’s disingenuous at best. This is stupid incompetence and not paying attention, being extremely careless with a person in their care.
If a parent leaves a gun unattended in their bedroom during a party, and a kid goes and shoots themselves or someone else with it, is that parent or the adults at that party attempting to kill the kid or the other person? No, they are just criminally negligent.
If a parent leaves a gun unattended in their bedroom during a party
It is nowhere near as negligent and actively harmful as parking a car on train tracks and then handcuffing a person into the back seat of that car.
Maybe you missed the point where I explicitly said this was criminal negligence. I was arguing it wasn’t intentional homicide, like the guy I replied to said it was.
Right. I’m saying that parking a car on the tracks and then handcuffing someone into it is far more negligent, to the point of crossing over into predictably horrible outcome, not just opening the door to bad outcomes like normal negligence does.
Tying someone to the railroad tracks isn’t what drunk idiots do in old westerns; it’s what the bad guys do.
Thank you.
Parked the vehicle on the tracks!! Wtf?!
That’s one of the top, like, three things you’re told not to do with a car.
But one of the top things you might do if you were an immoral bully who was immune from criminal prosecution.
Or just really stupid or careless or both, which is more likely to be the cause here. For both of the cops involved. While also being a bully.
To be fair, the former cop who did this isn’t the one who parked the car there. She just placed the suspect into the closest cop car, which happened to be on the tracks. I still think she should be liable for putting someone in that situation, but it’s not as bad as her parking on the tracks and then putting a person in a car she knew was on the tracks. Yeah, she should have noticed the car was on the tracks, but she didn’t park it there and might have assumed nobody would be so fucking stupid as to park on the tracks.
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Not sure why her level of assumption abojt whether cars would be on tracks would matter, if the tracks aren’t visually obscured or something.
One might assume there’d never be a volcano in Idaho, but when you toss a baby into the volcano you found in Idaho it doesn’t really matter what you would have assumed.
I think all of you claiming this was intentional need to remember Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Are cops evil bastards? Yes. But they also don’t need to come up with something this convoluted to kill someone they want dead. On the other hand, there are demonstrably a ton of very stupid cops.
Real mustache twirling villian energy here.
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