Last may, the Maryland Daily Record published an editorial which decried the amount of city money being used to settle police misconduct cases:
“Baltimore taxpayers have paid at least $16.8 million since July 2004 to settle lawsuits involving the city police department. The cases range from garden-variety policy misconduct to a $6 million settlement in the case of Jeffrey Alston, who was paralyzed in the aftermath of a police stop in 1997, to a $2.5 million settlement of an employee bias suit filed by black officers. Just how much is $16.8 million to a cash-strapped city? (a lot?)….But the numbers appear to be well short of the actual cost…The $16.8 million reported by the solicitor’s office does not include the city’s cost of defending those cases, some of the plaintiffs’ legal fees and expenses related to monitoring or compliance. One more thing — the $16.8 million does not include settlements reached this year but still not approved by the Board of Estimates. Those pending settlements total in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
We seem to have the same problem in the state of Washington. An Everett police officer, Troy Meade, was recently fired in the aftermath of the shooting death of one Niles Meservey in the parking lot of an Everett bed-and-breakfast; Meade would later be acquitted of second degree murder in the case. Two years after the event, in which Meade was on administrative leave and an internal investigation found his use of lethal force unjustified, the out-going police chief Jim Scharf stated in a letter of termination that "In my opinion, it is inexplicable that you failed to utilize different force options or to simply move further out of the way of Mr. Meservey's vehicle and reassess the situation; instead, you precipitately used deadly force. Your actions were incompatible with the Department's priority of protecting and preserving human life."
According to the Everett Herald, during his two years of what was essentially a paid vacation, Meade received over $183,000 in “earnings,” and this doesn’t including health care and other benefits. And that was just the start of this taxpayer boondoggle; the city was charged $240,000 in legal fees for Meade’s criminal defense, and another half-million for the city’s defense in the wrongful death civil case brought forward by Meservey’s family. The city eventually settled with the family for $500,000. This one paranoid, trigger-happy cop cost the city $1.5 million—money that could have been spent on public programs already short of funds.
This story was hot on the heels of revelations that in a civil case brought by a man who claimed he was held at gunpoint by a rogue cop for an inordinate amount of time, the laughter stopped at the one buck judgment in his favor. Total legal costs to the city could potentially amount to $700,000. And that followed the $1.5 million in damages awarded to the family of John T. Williams; costs in the legal defense of Officer Ian Birk has not been disclosed. And that followed closely the $10 million dollar judgment against King County in the case of a transit deputy crushing the head of an innocent man against a wall in Seattle, causing permanent brain damage and disability (again, legal costs not disclosed). And we haven’t even begun to talk about the massive amount of overtime pay that propels the lowest-ranking deputies and officers into the highest-paid public employees. And to do what? The Baskin-Robbins I’m sitting in while I’m writing this has been the target of early morning break-ins twice in the span of a few months; the establishment has large windows, and is clearly seen off a main street. These crooks obviously didn’t feel any fear of being caught, with a cop or two sleeping-off his overtime. And the other evening at the exact same spot where I was harassed by a Kent police officer on my way to work (which I described about here previously), I heard what could have been a car backfire, except that there was no car in sight. However, there was this instantaneous whizzing sound that passed me some 15 yards to my right. Except for the American Pile-Driving Company being open for the late shift, the area seemed otherwise deserted.
The odd thing about all of this is that for most people, all this money has no real meaning; it’s just some abstraction that is simply debited from some indefinable wellspring that has no connection to the real world. But it is real money that rogue cops are stealing from cash-strapped municipalities. Thanks to police guilds which use blackmail and threats to tie the hands of city councils, communities and the courts to deal with rogue cops (and jurors who are blind to the difference between an individual’s pathology and the “stress” of the job), it is impossible to deal with these cops until the damage has been done. We are given the either/or of turning a blind eye to bad cops or pay the consequences: less money for education, health care, public transit, community services, parks and ultimately jobs.
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