Oh dear- lots come to mind, perhaps he is trying to protect the Rio lady who took is wallet -
âWhy would anybody fabricate anything?â Steve Lochte said.
âHumanah, humanah, humanah!â
Interesting case. Hopefully just some normal, people remembering things differently, but I wonât be surprised if they were doing something illegal like drugs or sex. Damn younins!
Oh FFS. It couldnât be more goddamn obvious whatâs going on here. They got robbed by a cop while they were really drunk. Their accounts differ because they were drunk. And theyâre being investigated for lying to the authorities because either it was really a cop who robbed them or the locals are assuming it is.
If this was Texas and they were black, would anyone have any trouble piecing this together? Why the hell are so many people having trouble believing that Americans would be treated differently in, let us face it, a nation not exactly known for the the integrity of its police and judiciary?
With all the crime in Rio, this alleged petty theft story and the inconsistent stories of the young, excited alleged victims (* The inconsistencies in the stories of four people who had been celebrating and drinking all night is understandableâŚeach with varying degrees of sobriety and recollection.They would have made perfect targets for just such a robbery by any number of people, including some corrupt police officials.) are worthy of the full force of Rioâs judiciary to investigate???
Sounds like one moral of the story is if youâre a foreigner and are actually robbed and manage to survive in good health, you should make sure youâre out of the country before you say anything. This sounds like a lot of overreach by the Brazilians and only exacerbates an incident that would have been little more than a footnote by now, and the negatives already circulating at these games donât need any additional âincidents.â
What a mess this story has become.
Helpful item for US travelers. Do not, even figuratively, flip the bird to a foreign countryâs authority. Changing oneâs story about a crime is one way to do that.
This is an interesting twistâŚ
Except they didnât say their wallets had been stolen. They said theyâd been robbed by someone with cop credentials. And if a South American cop robs you, heâs not going to take your wallet because he knows the credit cards are only convertible to cash by contact with people who will rat you out if they get caught. Cop robbery generally always going to be a cash only transaction.
And âwhat looks to be a phone or a wallet?â Oh yeah, that supports that headline.
But yeah, given the consistantly anti-American undertone of that penny dreadful rag, Iâm really not surprised.
Just now on MSNBC: Brazilian authorities say they have a tape of an altercation at a gas station involving the athletes, that the story was simply fabricated, and that the attendant at the station confronted them about damage to the restroom he believed they did.
Lordyâ! If they fabricated the story, they do have a lot to lose now: endorsements, marketing opportunities, guest appearancesâŚetc.
If this is correct, they missed the first rule of dealing with day-to-day social conflict today: Assume a camera is always watching and use common sense to deal with it.
Iâm not really following this closely, and I donât expect athletes to act any particular way out in public although also shouldnât get any free passes.
That said, it does seem like some develop the celebrity penchant to get in trouble and think they have a get out of jail card because of fame. So I always kind of halfway expect that.
If thereâs some video it might help clear these questions up. And per this article Lochte did claim his wallet was taken.
Bottom line, I hope if heâs innocent heâs cleared and if heâs not it gets addressed and police donât have to be punished for his shit.
No cops will be punished. Come on. Pretend heâs black and it happened in rural Texas and read what the Brazilian authorities are saying in that light. It reeks of corrupt cop ass-cover bullshit.
I donât have any trouble believing that there are probably plenty of corrupt cops in Brazil, but I also have no problem believing that athletes would go out celebrating, get drunk, do dumb shit, get caught, and try to get out of it by blaming the cops. And if thereâs security video and the athletes seem to be changing their story, Iâm leaning toward the latter, just sayinâ.
He says his wallet was taken in this early interviewâŚIâm leaning toward lyinâ partierâŚjust sayinââŚ
What Iâm finding depressing about this story is the extent to which it has shown me that the willingness to make assumptions about people who are accused of crimes to vindicate the cops based on oneâs one prejudices isnât just a right-wing authoritarian tendency, but, rather, seems to be an inherent property of pre-existing categorical biases about the victim/subject.
My own biases are very much in play here, and I admit it. I look at how this has gone down and I instantly see and hear the way every wrongful shooting and killing of the last several years has gone down. The instant circling of cop wagons and the attempt to demonize the victim, the willingness of people to assume the worst about the victim and uncritically consider what the cops said. The rush to judgment of media outlets with either a taste for the sensational or, worse still, a recognizable audience bias.
I am untroubled by inconsistencies and rambling by people who say they were victims of a violent crime, particularly when they were drunk when it happened. Thatâs always the case. The time to be suspicious is when the witness and victim statements all line up perfectly, without any inconsistencies and when the victim tells the story the same way every time. And the reason I am untroubled is because my training, my experience with witnesses, all the research Iâve done as a matter of professional interestâas well as my personal experience with car wrecks and with the classic âfake robbery during Evidence classâ thing my Evidence professor did in law schoolâtells me that thatâs how it happens. Because it turns out when someone points a gun at you, your description of the perp is basically âhe looked like a big, menacing black hole, and, oh, here are some details my brain has fabricated out of god knows what to surround that description.â Fight or flight hormones, and traumatic situations generally, fuck up memory formationj when youâre sober, much less when youâre drunk. And every time you recount the event, you remember things you didnât remember before. Sometimes those things are even real.
THIS IS WHY NO ONE SHOULD EVER, EVER, EVER BE EXECUTED SOLELY ON THE BASIS OF EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY.
But, maddeningly, people think that inconsistencies are vastly more important than they are, indicia of fabrication rather than the lack thereof. They think great certainty is the same as accuracy. And holy crap do people in my business exploit that widespread belief when examining witnesses.
No, my biases here are of the âcorrupt cop covering corrupt cop asses bullshit detectorâ variety. To me, itâs the mere fact that the Brazilian authorities are pursing this rather than just letting it go thatâs suspicious. Cops canât substantiate a criminal report and, rather than just saying âwe canât substantiate thatâ and moving on to the next thing on their overwhelmingly long list of things to investigate, they immediately turning it into an investigation of the victim for filing a false report? Really? And why is that?
Well, now, letâs see. Is a policeman, or someone pretending to be one, accused of committing a crime? Check. Are the cops in question notoriously corrupt? Check. Is the accuser someone whoâs in a group against whom the cops might harbor some racial or nationalistic prejudice? Check. Are there strange inconsistencies in the copâs story? Well, now, thereâs the part where the authorities claim that the swimmers claimed that someone posing as a cop robbed them. They said that? How would they know the person was just posing as a cop? How would the cops know the perp was just posing as a cop given that they now say there is no perp? And, boom, instantly switching from a desultory search for perps to a sudden, intensive investigation of the accuser? My cop ass-covering bullshit detector is at 1000 clicks a minuted.
So thatâs my bias. If this was a black guy driving through Texas or just trying to get across the tiny fiefdoms comprising the St. Louis metro area telling me this story, would all of be screaming âbullshit?â Hell yes.
And against that, however, I see an awful lot of people who seem to be willing to make an awful lot of assumptions, and take the word of authorities and sketchy media sources as the gospel, based on a lot of assumptions they bring to the table about, well, white superjocks generally and the Olympians specifically. And a lot of preciousness when it comes to overlooking the reputation for outright criminality among Brazilian cops.
I donât have any need to vindicate any cops that overstep their bounds Iâm just getting the feeling they didnât, in this particular case. Donât have any proof, but the video seems to agree with the copâs story and none of Ryanâs several stories. Yes if you have been through trauma you might forget stuff or remember it incorrectly(hell Iâd forget my ass if it wasnât attached even with out trauma), but in this case the video seems to be matching the policeâs story. Hey shit happens, sometimes cops do tell the truth.
And I have a really hard time equating the way white local cops and sheriffs in america took over the role of citizens harassing blacks after the feds cracked down with one episode of 4 white guys in Brazil, going out and getting drunk, then telling a several different stories that donât seem to match up with the video.
This is an interesting tweet that came up when I googled this story in light of your feelings that this is similar to how blacks in america get treated by cops. A lot of black folks feel itâs just like the US but in a 180 degree respect.
https://twitter.com/PrestonMitchum/status/766355762776043520
Edit: One interesting comment in an opinion piece I saw today was that Ryanâs belief that theyâd been robbed could be due to a language misunderstanding and him thinking that the security guards were cops(I saw a lot of security guards in almost every business I went in during a recent trip to Mexico) and they were just asking or demanding they pay for the damages to the bathroom not trying to rob them.
This explanation seems to match up with the stories and video best of all.