Discussion for article #238892
Supposedly the video of this is so horrendous that riots were feared so the cynic in me says that this prompt action is more about keeping the footage out of the public eye than a true quest for justice. With a murder charge officials can credibly claim that releasing the vid would be prejudicial to the defendant and would pollute the jury pool so there will be no release and no riots.
Never mind, I replied before reading the whole thing, I see they’re releasing the video.
I could see a regular cop shooting a black guy for not having a license plate on his car but why is a university police officer even carrying a gun?
3 Likes
I didn’t think university police were typically armed either, so I just did a little checking. Currently, anywhere between 75-90% of campus police carry guns - apparently a substantive increase in recent years. And, they have no requirement to report use of weapons to any federal agency even for statistical purposes. Jeez, we really are becoming a police state . . .
1 Like
They are trying to get guns in public schools now. This isn’t surprising.
The cop at my daughters middle school is armed.
U of C has an agreement with Cincinnati cops to patrol neighborhoods around the campus. Hopefully that ends now.
2 Likes
Well, at least the good guys have the guns…
1 Like
Well, BillfromPA, here’s what I am starting to worry about. Reading the news media coverage on this from the last hour or so, I am seeing a lot of comments from Hamilton County prosecutor Joe Deters that disparage the indicted officer and which could be construed as commenting on his guilt. Generally speaking, that’s a no-no. A prosecutor can comment publicly on the charges a defendant faces, but the prosecutor crosses the line when he/she starts talking about the defendant’s character or offers an opinion that the defendant is guilty. That jeopardizes the defendant’s right to a fair trial. This worries me here because, before the ink is even dry on the indictment, Deters may be giving this officer a basis for appeal if convicted. Maybe Deters is just a blow-hard prosecutor. (That would not surprise me in conservative Cincinnati.) Then again, maybe there’s something more purposeful in his comments. It’s not like we haven’t recently seen a prosecutor taint the process to scuttle the indictment of an officer (i.e., Robert McCulloch, who handled the grand jury in the Michael Brown killing). Either way, Deters should check himself. Otherwise, he may end up giving this officer a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Can it be, a new turning point? A prosecutor who actually wants to prosecute a murdering cop, and a conviction? We can hope. Meanwhile I’m not sure I want to see this video.
A few years back the Adjunct Faculty Union along with AAUP protested the proposal to arm the campus cops at Portland State U. We won that round but the idea has come back and probably sooner or later the cc will be armed. Pretty disturbing.
Okay, that freaks me out.
1 Like
Yeah…especially when you consider that we are talking about people who are unable to get over the relativity low bar of becoming an actual officer, and are there to police the exact people that they have the biggest unresolved issues from high school, so its a really bad pairing.
I wonder if there’s bad blood between the campus cops and the regular police force. That might explain some of the prosecutor’s public attitude. But geez. Maybe we need to go back to the old british model where ordinary police simply did not carry weapons.
guess we have to play this game again. even if it was true he was dragged by the car, he is an amazing shot, got his holstered gun out and made one single shot to the innocent man’s head?
2 Likes
If officers realized they were being videotaped this mess would end. Apparently this cop didn’t think the video would ever surface.
Huh? Prosecutors do that all the time - their job is to convince people that the person they are prosecuting committed the crime and is guilty.
3 Likes
Glad the cop had body cam. This is yet another case where cop writes a report and video shows they were lying. Remember Walter Scott and the passerby that captured him being shot in the back.
I wonder how many other cases cop shot someone in cold blood and got away with it.
Also the person that backed up the cop by saying he was dragged needs to face charges as well.
9 Likes
All the cops at UNC, where I went to law school a few decades ago, were armed and entitled to follow you off campus to ticket you if you drove through with expired tags or whatever. At my college, the they didn’t even call them “police,” give them uniforms or allow them to arrest people. They were just campus security. As best I could tell, the office was mainly a pretext for a handful of guys in their thirties and forties to chase coed skirt.
The real asskicker here is that the whole reason a university has its own cops is to limit the students’ exposure to town cops and the real criminal justice system. The UNC, Chapel Hill (and Carrboro) police were among the nicest, most chill cops in the universe, at least back when I was there, well aware that there’s way too much underage drinking and weed going on in a college town for them to waste their time with it as long as people stayed safe and didn’t riot. They were without mercy on drunk driving, but they understood that their job was to protect, not to occupy a hostile war zone and contain the “animals at the zoo,” a mentality city cops can all too easily fall into in a college town.
1 Like
I’m not talking about what a prosecutor argues to the jury in closing statements at trial (although there are rules circumscribing what a prosecutor can say in that situation, as well). I’m talking about what a prosecutor says publicly about a defendant before the trial, such as when the prosecutor announces an indictment, as happened today in Cincinnati. A prosecutor can talk about what’s in the indictment. The prosecutor is not supposed to say things like: “This guy is a depraved scumbag who is guilty of murder.” Read some of Deters’ comments to the news media. He’s getting close to the line, and that will only work in favor of the indicted officer. Here’s an article that provides an example of the line I’m talking about:
http://enathanael.com/2015/04/10/judge-scolds-u-s-attorney-preet-bharara-over-speeches-and-tweets/