Sole Morality

Bully Badge

Ok, it has been a little bit. Good grief things have been busy and still are busy. But I came across this article via @cboyack and @ekimatuan on Twitter and it made me feel ill.

Out of the Philadelphia Daily News comes a report of police bullying that will make you want to throw something (preferably not at the LCD monitor, they can be expensive). Here's the scenario.

Imagine you are in your car and are rear-ended by another vehicle that drives off instead of stopping. The driver of the other vehicle turns out to be the son of a local cop who is on duty. The son goes and reports the accident to dad. What do you think should happen?

Morally, the father shouldn't show any preference in taking the report of the accident. Ethically, I believe the father shouldn't even get involved and the entire incident should be handled by another officer if not an officer from a different department. Relation to an officer should play no part in the investigation of an accident. What do you think actually happened? Well, if you didn't click through the link, then I can almost guarantee you won't guess. The cop assaults the victim.

Officer Lopez takes his son in his patrol car to the convenience store the accident victims are at and confronts him. During all of this, his son is armed with a handgun, although it was never drawn. Officer Lopez's account is that he ordered Agnes Lawless and her three companions to the ground and that she resisted, assaulting the officer. That is the charge she was arrested on and for which spent a night in jail. That is the story that the courts believed over Lawless' story, even though all three of her companions and the store clerk gave stories that matched hers.

The fact that the courts would side with a cop over the victim isn't unheard of as they often are faced with a he-said-she-said situation of events. The fact that they believed a single police officer over the victim and four other witnesses is concerning if not suspect. Oh, did I mention that the officer's son was involved in the accident that lead to this, thereby possibly prejudicing him in the recount of the events? I did? Oh, I don't see why I bothered since the officer didn't! In fact, he didn't even use his son's name in the report, only referring to him as a "witness." But the court did side with the officer and suggest that Lawless be brought to trial. Well, they did until the store's security footage was released and showed a different course of events. One that matched Lawless' version.

Despite her not being hostile in the least at the outset of the encoutner, Officer Lopez proceeded to approach Lawless from behind with a drawn handgun, forcibly grab her by the neck, force his gun against her neck, and struck her in the face. Lawless, uncertain of what was going on and obviously confused by the lack of professional behavior, felt that the best thing would be to leave the situation and call for some "real cops." She is stopped and physically restrained, not by Officer Lopez, but by his son. Officer Lopez twice asks the store clerk to "do himself a favor" and erase the security camera footage. Three times after the incident, cops tell the clerk to erase the tapes and testify for the cop.

With the video out and the charges aginst Lawless dropped, an Internal Affairs investigation was conducted. Here is a man who violated the public's trust by engaging in completely inappropriate and unprofessional behavior, comitted multiple crimes as he assaulted members of the public, and endangered the lives of all of the people in the store when he needlessly initiated a physical confrontation with a drawn handgun, pressing it up against the body of an innocent person in a threatening manner. Certainly plenty for an IA investigation to work from and with video footage of the encounter, you'd think that would be plenty of evidence.

No, not really. And this is where the article got my attention.

After four months, the district attourney decided not to prosecute Officer L0pez. In the end, the Internal Affairs investigation found that Officer Lopez had violated departmental policies, but that was all. He was reissued his gun and is back on full duty although the department may still reprimand him.

Frankly, that is thoroughly insufficient. He should have lost his gun, his badge, and his commission and been barred from ever being employed in law enforcement again.

Lapses in judgment like that of Officer Lopez's would be utterly inexcusable if committed by the public and should be equally so when committed by police officers. Officers should be ticketed every time they are caught speeding and not let off for the exact reason that they are police officers and should be setting the example of the behavior they expect the populous at large to exhibit. They should be the shining examples of what it means to be a law abiding citizen.

Police officers are granted an incalculable trust by the public and when they violate that trust, there must be significant consequences if the people are to be able to continue to place that trust in the police as a whole. Christ put it best when he told the mass assembled to put the adulterous woman to death when he advised the person who was without sin to cast the first stone.

How can we allow someone to enforce the rule of law who is on film eggregiously violating that law and reportedly shouting, "You think you can hit my son and get away with it, you think you can f--- with me?"

We can't and we should never be asked to do so.

The sting of discrimination

This article is from a couple months ago. Truthfully, I couldn't help but find some irony in this bit from the Oregon Department of Transportation. From the article:

A $30 million project to add a lane to Highway 217 in Washington County is the first to include requirements for hiring African-American and Asian-American contractors. In years past, ODOT did not specify which minority groups needed to receive state contracts.

“If you’re a minority, you’re a minority. There’s no classifications,” said Gene Nelson, owner of Forest Grove-based Sundown Electric Co., a Native American-owned electrical contractor specializing in highway construction projects. “We are now a minority that is being discriminated against.”

For me, the big irony here is the loud protests of minority preferential treatment from someone who has probably been receiving government contact work over others based solely on his minority status. Perhaps Gene Nelson now understands a bit about how many non-minority owned/run businesses feel when they are passed over for jobs based not on the merits of their work or the bid price that they submitted, but on the color of their skin.

The majority of blacks feel that with the election of President Obama, Martin Luther King's dream has been fulfilled. I'm not sure that what the Oregon DOT is doing right now is quite in line with his dream that his "children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

I'm of the opinion that Dr. King's dreams will more fully be realized when our government hires contractors based on who can do the job quickest, cheapest, and best, not based on the color of their skin. His dream won't be reality until Gene Nelson's comment of "there's no classifications" applies to all US citizens and not just minorities.

The dangers of state run health care

While many people tout the advantages of nationalized health care, government run health care isn't always all people make it out to be. For Barbara Wagner, it was quite a bit less.

Barbara is on the Oregon Health Plan (OHP), a state run health care plan. Suffering from lung cancer, Barbara sought treatment from a physician who prescribed a medication that would slow the growth of her cancer and consequently extend her life.

So, like any one of us would do, she wanted to fill her prescription and start taking the medications. And that is what she would have done, except her insurance said no.

OHP came back and said that they weren't willing to pay for her medications.

"We can't cover everything for everyone," Dr. Walter Shaffer, medical director of the state Division of Medical Assistance Programs said. "We try to come up with polices that provide the most good for the most people."

Lest you think OHP is heartless and doesn't care about members of their health plan, they didn't leave Barbara without any options. They did leave her one that they would pay for: doctor-assisted suicide.

Oregon is the only state that allows physician-assisted suicide. Apparently it is the preferred alternative if the state doesn't feel that your treatment for a terminal illness will be of "enough benefit."

[Dr.] Shaffer then addressed a priority list that had been developed to ration health care. "There's some desire on the part of the framers of this list to not cover treatments that are futile," he said, "or where the potential benefit to the patient is minimal in relation to the expense of providing the care."

Minimal. The problem is that minimal is a rather subjective term when you are talking about life.

Thankfully, the company that makes the drug that Barbara was prescribed has stepped up and is providing it to her at no cost.

I personally think that OHP was flat out of line for indicating that they would pay for the suicide option but not her meds. Right or wrong on their refusal to pay for meds, offering the alternative was just plain wrong. Let her doctor bring up the assisted suicide option.

“To say to someone, we’ll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live, it’s cruel,” [Barbara] said.

I couldn't agree more.