… and for his targeted attack on an older teen — not the doorkicking perp.
No charges, apparently, for rounding up a posse of other cops from other jurisdictions to instigate a manhunt for Delaware’s Most Wanted doorkicker:
Walters’ girlfriend called him and gave him a description of the boy, police said. Walters, who was on duty, drove to his neighborhood and called other troopers and police departments for help.
I’d like to know more about these other cops, who abandoned their duties to help Walters in his crimes.
As the 15-year-old was put in a police vehicle, Walters confirmed with another trooper that the boy was the juvenile who had kicked his door. Walters then turned off his body-worn camera and walked to the police vehicle.
While the boy was handcuffed in the back of the vehicle, Walters punched him in the face, fracturing his right eye socket. Walters then walked around the vehicle and turned his body camera back on.
He felt comfortable and safe doing this in front of multiple cops from other departments. That’s pretty telling.
Maybe next time instead of kicking his door someone will just light it on fire.
He felt comfortable and safe doing this in front of multiple cops from other departments. That’s pretty telling.
Police culture is rotten. It’s been empirically proven repeatedly, and even a cursory examination of the history of US policing should make it unsurprising. (And I’m talking about much more than slave patrols)
It would be a literal miracle if the history of US police was what it is and there wasn’t still a culture of shit.
There are probably cops who were beating civil rights protestors in the late 60’s who only retired in the last decade. If you told me every cop hired since the year 2000 has been a shining beacon of fair thought and upright morals when they were hired, I’d still expect things to be not much less shit as they are now.
Culture in a long-running organization is a slow moving thing. You don’t just need the racist bigot dinosaurs to die out, you don’t just need to not hire more racist bigots (which surely they have), you need to wait for all the ripples from the impacts those racist bigot dinosaurs had on the folks who came in behind them, and on policy, to die out.
I doubt we’re much beyond the very infancy of waiting for that, even if we believed that every department was striving to do better. (And I very much do not believe such a thing.)
Yeah, it takes generations for racism to die out in a family, so we shouldn’t expect an instant 180.
Imagine if it were cops at Kent State during Vietnam protests.
Turning off a body cam should be (at the very least) a citation offence against the officer.
If it comes to light that they were covering up something illegal or unethical (which is the entire point of shutting it off), then it should automatically escalate the response to the next level.
If we lived in a sane society it should be cause for immediate termination and black mark on being hired anywhere else. But we don’t live in such a society
The devices shouldn’t even have an ‘off’ switch — eight hours of video for every eight-hour shift.
Until that happens, a bodycam that was ‘on’ but then switched ‘off’ should amount to a confession of whatever misconduct is alleged.
It needs to be a fireable offense with criminal charges.
Removed by mod
My links are to archival sites, to get past paywalls and regional barriers. The text is archived, but videos usually aren’t. Underneath the headline there’s a link to the original site, with the video.
