Why do bad cops stay employed for years while good cops find themselves out of their jobs? The answer will not surprise you.
The answer is not so complicated as it is filled with infuriating details. Cops drive fast because they have tacit permission to do so. Almost any reason will do. A deputy who had been ordered not to pursue a vehicle did so anyway, resulting in him rear-ending another car while traveling at 104 mph. The deputy managed to avoid any serious injuries. The victim, however, was left to deal with this:
That crash was into the rear of a Smart car driven by Harry Deshommes. While Hegele did not suffer any serious injuries, Deshommes had to have his spleen removed and suffered from a skull fracture, a traumatic brain injury, a broken left arm, a broken back, several broken ribs and a broken pelvis, according to CBS 12. Deshommes’ Smart car reportedly rolled several times after impact.
Cops drive this way even when off-duty. In this case, an off-duty officer caused a crash but it was the woman whose car he hit who was initially criminally charged, despite the accident killing her infant child and injuring all six people in the van.
Just weeks after a Baton Rouge police officer was arrested on negligent homicide and accused of causing a crash that injured several people and killed a baby, the child’s mother was also arrested on the same charge because police said she failed to properly secure the baby’s car seat.
Brittany Stephens, 20, was arrested Tuesday after police found that her daughter’s car seat was not secured and the straps were not adjusted correctly for the child’s height, according to her arrest report. Police said the “lack of securing the seat to the vehicle and the loose straps are a contributing factor in the death” of the child and “show gross negligence” on the mother’s part.
Fortunately, the officer was also criminally charged. But the PD, which gave him a paid vacation while his legal problems were sorted out, refused to specify when it would open its own investigation into the incident.
That investigation will not begin until he recovers from his injuries and is released to work by a doctor.
Here’s a deputy “responding to a suicide” who crashed his cruiser at 110 mph without his emergency lights activated. According to the deputy, the car that barely clipped the rear end of his vehicle ran a stop sign. An investigation said otherwise and the deputy was charged with reckless driving. The crash also resulted in a multi-day search for the police dog that was in the car at the time of the crash.
Here’s another cop rushing to the scene of a… wait for it… “Shop with a Cop” event where an officer had locked himself out of a vehicle. Apparently, the officer felt it was an emergency and hit a high school student’s car while traveling 96 mph in a 50-mph zone, killing her.
Cops make spectacularly bad judgments while driving. Being in a police car apparently immunizes them from traffic laws and literally anything that can be viewed as an officer distress call — whether it’s an officer down or an officer trying to get into their locked car — will be treated as such. Civilians are presumably just supposed to govern themselves accordingly and try not to get hit by uniformed reckless drivers.
But police officials don’t get upset about reckless driving by officers until after it hurts or kills someone. And even then, as detailed above, investigations will be delayed and officers will continue to get paid while the wheels of justice move at the speed of police accountability.
What police officials will be proactive about is punishing any officer who calls out other officers’ bad behavior. Case in point, this Miami Herald story that, for no apparent reason, refers to the legitimate (if poorly phrased) complaint as “whining.”
The city of Miami’s police chief wants to know which of his officers complained to radio dispatch Monday night that patrol cars passing him at a high rate of speed — as they raced to the scene of a cop who had been shot — were endangering him.
In a 32-second audio recording provided to the Herald, an officer can be heard asking dispatch to find out why Miami-Dade patrol cars are passing him at 60 mph on Northwest Seventh Avenue.
When dispatch replied “officer down,” a male officer responded: “To yourselves, let them know they’re going to have another officer down if they keep going at 70 miles per hour near my car.”
Now, this comment can be taken a couple of ways. It could mean the officer intended to personally harm the next cop that headed down this street at an excessive rate of speed. Or he could have meant the reckless driving was likely to result in another cop injury or death.
The implicit message should have been clear: officers were driving unsafely, posing a risk to themselves and others. Driving so unsafely, in fact, that a cop felt compelled to comment on it.
The immediate response from the Miami police chief was to call the officer’s comment “disgusting” and “disturbing.” The follow up response was to inform the public via social media that the Miami PD definitely wanted to punish this cop for expressing his concern about other officers’ actions.
We are aware of a police audio radio transmission possibly involving one of our officers.
If in fact it is determined that it is our officer, he will be held accountable for his actions. It is unsettling and disturbing listening to the lack of concern, compassion, and empathy.
Is that a fact? What about the lack of concern implicitly expressed in this official statement, which suggests officers are correct to operate their vehicles unsafely as long as there’s some sort of emergency to respond to? And what exactly does the officer need to be punished for? He expressed an apparently unpopular sentiment, but that doesn’t make him wrong. If this officer does get rung up for informing dispatch about unsafe driving, hopefully his union will step up and get his punishment overturned. It would be nice to see a police union be on the right side of history for a change and this would give it a perfect opportunity to do so.
But it’s extremely unlikely this will happen. The local police union has already gone on record, implicitly stating it’s only willing to defend officers engaged in actual misconduct.
The South Florida Police Benevolent Association says the audio is not a reflection of the City of Miami Police Department.
This statement doesn’t send the message the PD hopes it does. Instead, it tells the public the only misconduct it will respond swiftly to is officers criticizing other officers. It also tells taxpayers that anyone hit by a speeding cop car is just in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the “wrong place” being any road and the “wrong time” being any time officers choose to drive recklessly.
Filed Under: complaints, cops speeding, florida, miami, miami police department, speeding
The Cannonball Run plot of racing across the US has inspired some drivers to set illegal records — though the concept was started in 1933 by Edwin “Cannonball” Baker who drove from NYC to LA in 53 hours (and popularized in the 70s as a protest against highway speed limits). We’ve previously mentioned Alex Roy making the trip in about 32 hours, but more recently, Ed Bolian and a couple other drivers/passengers did it in just 28 hours and 50 minutes. If you’ve always wanted to drive across country in some insane way, check out some of the records that other people have set.
After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.
Filed Under: alex roy, autonomous cars, cannonball run, carl reese, driving, ed bolian, edwin cannonball baker, electric vehicles, speeding Companies: delphi, tesla
We’ve covered stories in the past about when municipalities begin seeing their governing role as one less about representing their people and more about extorting as much money as possible from non-residents. Previously, one Oklahoma town found themselves disallowed from enforcing their traffic tickets when it was discovered that the process had devolved into what was essentially a money-making scheme. Never one to be outdone when it comes to crazy, the state of Florida has upped the ante.
Hampton, Florida is the kind of town you might miss if you blink as you’re driving through it. Miss it, that is, unless you managed to get ensnared by one of the most brutal traffic policing regimes this side of the border patrol.
And so it fell to the police to force hurried travelers to stop and savor the 1,260-foot ribbon of roadway belonging to this city. Hidden by trash bins or concealed in a stretch of woods, the officers — a word loosely applied here — pointed their radar devices. Between 2011 and 2012, Hampton’s officers issued 12,698 speeding tickets to motorists, many most likely caught outside Hampton’s strip of county road.
Some context about Hampton, if I might. The town has less than 500 total residents, but has a police force of 14. Around 3% of their residents are officers. In comparison, Chicago has roughly 2.7 million residents and 12,244 officers, or less than one half of one percent of the population. Six times the percentage of residents as offered, for a town that consists of a three-football-fields sized strip of road. That must be why the town somehow pulled in nearly a quarter of a million dollars in traffic fines the past three years. What’s less clear is how all that money is brought in and still the town operates on a deficit. The mystery seems less confounding when you realize that the town’s mayor is currently in jail awaiting trial for possession of Oxycodone with intent to sell and that all of City Hall appears to serve as a sort of blank check for nepotism.
Jane Hall, the former city clerk, is the mother of the former maintenance operator, Adam Hall, who also ran the water system, and the wife of Charles Hall, a longtime city councilman. Her daughter also worked there for a short time. There were mutterings about vanishing city funds; personal use of city credit cards, trucks and gas; and trips to Ms. Hall’s clutter-filled house to hand over cash payments for water bills for which she offered no receipts. Some residents were threatened with the loss of water — the one utility controlled by the city — if they made trouble, Mr. Smith said. Auditors found that 46 percent of the city’s water went unaccounted for, much of it leaking through decrepit lines.
On top of all this, the local police chief somehow officially added being a church minister to his official job description, an audacious merging of church and state that I would have thought would be enough to make Thomas Jefferson rise from his grave with a musket in hand to go have a chat with this police chief. In any case, all this coupled with the town’s reluctance in providing any actual explanation for its misdeeds (at one point, town officials claimed certain records were lost in a swamp… seriously) has resulted in the state of Florida taking a look at de-towning the municipality.
“I have said it before: It’s something out of a Southern Gothic novel. You can’t make this stuff up,” said State Senator Rob Bradley, whose district includes the city. “This situation went on for so long and the mismanagement was so deep, we have to seriously consider abolishing the government.”
Hampton, a mishmash of trailers and wood-frame houses, some ramshackle, some not, has about 30 days to come up with a plan and make a genuine attempt to right itself or it will tumble into oblivion. The State Legislature would then take up a vote to dissolve it, handing over management of the city’s one square mile to Bradford County.
Good riddance, Hampton. When you can’t even be a town in Florida, you’ve clearly steered your ship into the rocks.
Filed Under: florida, hampton, police, speeding, tickets
America’s car culture has influenced a wide range of our daily lives — from creating suburban sprawl to making cars a status symbol that many aspire to own. However, gas-guzzling vehicles don’t quite have the same appeal as they used to, and autonomous vehicles may eventually suck all the fun out of driving on public roads. Before robots take over personal transportation, here are just a few examples of drivers pushing the limits of safety and driving crazy on regular city streets.
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: bullitt, cannonball run, car chase, cars, driving, film, rendezvous, speeding, steve mcqueen
If you’re speeding to make up time because you’re late for work and get pulled over, chances are telling the officer, “I’m late for work,” isn’t going to get you much more than a condescending, “And now you’re even later,” along with a citation. “Late for work” still isn’t an acceptable excuse for breaking the law. Unless you’re a Washington State legislator.
If you’re a Washington rep, all you have to do is explain you (theoretically) could be late for work and you’re free to continue on your way to Olympia, ticket-free and ready to get to the twice-annual business of legislating the hell out of something.
Washington state legislators headed to work can’t get speeding tickets — or so says the Washington State Patrol and at least one local police department.
A spokesman for WSP says Washington lawmakers are constitutionally protected from receiving noncriminal traffic tickets during a legislative session, as well as 15 days before. A spokeswoman says The Tacoma Police Department abides by a similar policy.
State Patrol spokesman Bob Calkins says the privilege not only applies to moving violations near the state Capitol in Olympia, but potentially anywhere in the state.
But why would you be late for work? The state legislature only meets twice a year (although each session can last as long as 5 months) and you’ve got 15 days to get there. I suppose the day-to-day grind of an extended session might result in a few snooze-button-heavy mornings of leadfooting it to the capitol building, but for the most part, legislators shouldn’t really rub up against this constitutional protection too often.
Here’s the section that gives legislators the right to put constitutionally-empowered pedals to the metal.
SECTION 16 PRIVILEGES FROM ARREST. Members of the legislature shall be privileged from arrest in all cases except treason, felony and breach of the peace; they shall not be subject to any civil process during the session of the legislature, nor for fifteen days next before the commencement of each session.
It’s not just speeding tickets legislators that can avoided, if this wording is accurate. There’s all sorts of criminal acts that don’t reach the “felony” level, all of which could conceivably be performed without consequence during legislative sessions (and 15 days prior). If viewed this way, speeding tickets (or lack thereof) are just scratching the surface.
Believe it or not, there’s a pretty solid (if outdated) rationale behind this exemption.
Hugh Spitzer, a Seattle lawyer who teaches state constitutional law at the University of Washington, said although protecting legislators from traffic tickets seems “pretty weird,” there’s a historical reason for the constitution’s privilege from arrest provisions.
The Stewart kings in 17th-century England were known for arresting political opponents and keeping them from reaching Parliament to vote, Spitzer said. The authors of the Declaration of Independence had similar complaints about King George III interfering with their regular legislative meetings, he said.
“It’s very old and there’s a good reason in the first place, but sometimes those reasons go away,” said Spitzer, who co-wrote “The Washington State Constitution: A Reference Guide.”
The Washington Constitution wasn’t ratified until 1889, so chances are that the threat of King George III disrupting legislative business had largely dissipated. But like many state constitutions, it draws heavily on the original, which includes this section:
The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.
Even though the rationale behind this section no longers exists, the law remains on the books and can be construed by wily lawmakers as a free pass for speeding. And even though the threat of an interfering king is long gone, it’s not hard to imagine a crooked politician abusing his or her power to have opponents detained by a “friends” in the law enforcement community. This may be just as uncommon as the threat it was originally written to address, but it doesn’t hurt to have some sort of protection built in to ensure legislators are free to go about the business of legislating unhassled by The Man.
On the other hand, the outdated rationale does lend itself to abuse. The fact that the legislature only meets twice a year will greatly limit the abuse and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Washington politicians are routinely exceeding the posted speed limits. Certainly this is a better solution than issuing legislators special license plates that are essentially “ticket-proof” 365 days a year, as they don’t exist in the DMV database. (Although if you’re interested in special plates, Washington will issue you a “square dancer license plate” for an additional fee. [Picture here.]) But still, it’s always a little disheartening to hear that lawmakers are immune from the same laws they’ve crafted, even if only on a part-time basis.
Filed Under: politicians, speeding, washington
Well, that didn’t take long. Remember that jackwagon that sped around Manhattan in a mega-illegal time-window of just over twenty-four minutes? Remember how he was all: pssh, you can’t identify me! Remember how Ray Kelly decided to declare his own personal war on a man named Afroduck, proving that reality is way more insane than anything you can think of from Adult Swim?
Yeah, he got busted, and it only took a day or so.
ABC 7 News was on hand to see Afroduck get taken into custody early this morning at the 25th Precinct in East Harlem. They report that [Christopher Adam] Tang is 30 years old. He gives no comment to the reporters, and he smiles.
The report goes on to say that no details were given on how they found Tang or tied him to the dash cam video he uploaded, but when Ray Kelly boasted that they have license plate cameras for that kind of thing, he wasn’t lying. Commenters in the original piece noted that the fact Tang wasn’t pulled over as he went about his speed run seemed like a complete lack of police presence, but there’s no shortage of license plate and traffic cams.
It will be interesting to see how an arrest based so heavily on evidence from this kind of technology, assuming we don’t learn of some other method for the identification of Tang, is used in court. Until then, stop making speed runs in the country’s largest city.
Filed Under: afroduck, nypd, ray kelly, speeding, youtube
Ray Kelly is the NYPD Commissioner with a heart of gold and a severe case of the flip-flops when it comes to how security technology in his city is used. The potential DHS chief candidate is a huge fan of the complete failure known as “stop and frisk”, as well as all the cameras and license plate readers the city has at its disposal, except when that technology is turned towards his officers. It’s classic Orwellian thinking, in which LEOs and the government get all the toys while you have to find the blind spots in all the cameras just to write in your journal. That journal these days meaning the internet, which of course doesn’t really offer any blind spots.
And that’s how we get headlines today about Ray Kelly apparently declaring war on someone going by the handle AfroDuck, which is exactly the comic relief the world needs right now. Who is AfroDuck, you ask? Well, he or she is an idiot who decided to circumnavigate Manhattan, a twenty-six-plus mile trip, in just twenty-four minutes. Then, because idiocy and internet-braggery go hand in hand like spaghetti and meatballs, AfroDuck uploaded a dash-cam video of the feat to the internet.
The anonymous speed demon averaged about 66 mph during the late-night circuit, which was captured on a dramatic dashboard-cam video and posted to YouTube under the username AfroDuckProduction. The drive breaks the previous mark of 26 minutes set in 2010. In both runs, the drivers cut out the top of Manhattan above the Cross Bronx Expressway.
So, let’s make this clear up front: this was a stupid thing to do. And, no, I’m not going to listen to anyone tell me about how a good driver can do this safely, or how over-protective we’ve become as a society. Shut up, you’re wrong. This is Manhattan and you shouldn’t be making speed runs, period, paragraph, full stop. And, while AfroDuck is getting the headlines for this, it should be noted that this isn’t a particularly new concept. A few years ago, Wired covered a driver who was trying to break the cross-country driving record, noting that earlier on, he’d been focused on doing a similar speed shot around Manhattan.
Having said that, AfroDuck may have a serious problem.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly promised to hunt down the dangerous driver, saying, “We now have license-plate readers in the city that will assist in this type of investigation.”
Other reports have officers stating that Ray Kelly has “declared war on AfroDuck” and plans on using all of that shiny awesome tech at his disposal to go after the speed demon. And, if their willingness to use stop and frisk as a law enforcement technique is any indication, I doubt the NYPD will mind terribly utilizing all of those license plate cameras to build at least a reckless driving case against him.
“You frankly can’t identify who I am by just looking at the video,” AfroDuck boasted to the car-geek Web site Jalopnik about his Aug. 26 ride, “and records were meant to be broken.” AfroDuck used a 2006 BMW Z4 for the breakneck drive.
That may be, but the NYPD likely can review all the cameras they have to find the license plate of the Z4 that was barreling through Manhattan sometime in the past few weeks and that plate will point them back to AfroDuck. As I said, this driver is an idiot, but it might be new territory to have the chief of police going after an individual simply for bragging online about a speed run and then using all kinds of new technology to do it. It’s a brave new surveillance state world, friends, which means you just can’t brag about your dumb crimes online anymore.
Filed Under: afroduck, manhattan, nyc, ray kelly, speeding, videos, youtube
A story suggest to us by reader Dan describes how an Ohio town recently issued 980 speeding ticket refunds. The city of Garfield Heights, Ohio, installed two speed cameras, attached to unmanned police cars, and then sent speeding tickets to those that were deemed to be speeding. The policy was to only issue tickets to those driving more than 11 miles per hour over the speed limit, so, when it was found that a number of tickets were issued to those driving 10 miles per hour over the limit, almost $100,000 in ticket revenue was refunded. Apparently, city officials had told the public that the tickets would be issued if people were caught driving 11 miles over the limit. So, if that’s the case, then is the speed limit actually the speed limit or not? Once again, this goes to show how completely arbitrary speed limit enforcement can be. Is there really a difference in safety in going 10 mph over the speed limit vs. 11? And, if anything, it seems that widely circulating this policy would simply encourage people to drive 9 miles over the limit.
Clearly, it’s a great money maker for the city. Since the month of June, when the cameras were installed, they sent out nearly 11,000 tickets, representing about $1,000,000 in added revenue. Sure, it’s possible that the city may need to cover a shortfall in a budget, but is the false guise of public safety the appropriate manner in which to obtain this revenue? At least this method is a little more scientific than other Ohio towns, where a policeman can issue a ticket by simply guessing how fast you were going.
Filed Under: fines, speed cameras, speeding, tickets
Via Slashdot, we find the story of Nevada gubernatorial candidate, Eugene “Gino” DiSimone, who is proposing a somewhat different idea for raising some extra money for the state: offering special “speeding” passes for $25 per day, which would let you drive up to 90 mph on designated highways. He claims it would raise $1 billion per year, which… seems extreme. If my math is correct (and it may not be), that means 40 million uses of this pass, meaning over 100,000 people using it every day. And those would have to be people who not only want to speed, but also figure $25 is worth it balanced against the likelihood of getting pulled over while just traveling 90 on your own. And it will only be allowed for vehicles that pass a special inspection and get a special transponder installed — further limiting the number of folks who can use it.
Also, nowhere are the “costs” of such a program discussed. Not only will there be these extra inspections, the transponders will cost money, and there’s technology infrastructure as well, including the ability to read the transponders, manage the database, set up the call-in system that will let people purchase the day pass, etc. The police are against the idea because they say it’ll create more accidents, which some might argue isn’t proven fact, but it probably does make their lives more complicated as well. Seems like this is more of an attempt to get some attention (oops, it worked) rather than any sort of serious proposal.
Filed Under: eugene disimone, nevada, politics, speeding
Forget faulty speed cameras. Don’t worry about police just guessing when they can’t quite make out your license plate on a red light photo. Fear not the police who misread driving through a green light as running the red. Over in Ohio, apparently a court has said that police don’t need any real evidence at all to charge you with speeding. They just need to make a “visual estimate” in their own judgment as to whether or not you were speeding:
In a 5-to-1 ruling, the court said an officer’s “unaided visual estimation of a vehicle’s speed” is strong enough to support a ticket and conviction. A radar speed detector, commonly used by patrolmen, is not needed, the court concluded.
“Independent verification of the vehicle’s speed is not necessary to support a conviction for speeding,” assuming the officer has been trained and certified by the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy or similar organization, Justice Maureen O’Connor wrote for the court’s majority.
That won’t be abused at all…
Filed Under: guessing, ohio, police, speeding
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