Seattle man died by suicide as a result of cop’s lie, mom says in new lawsuit
idahostatesman.com
idahostatesman.com
In a nutshell, we can stay silent so who cares?
The problem with that is that everyone should care. By the nature of their jobs, police deal with people with a variety of disabilities, levels of education and language comprehension. I don’t know that it’s reasonable to expect people to have the presence to remain silent. Yet if they don’t, we’ll happily incarcerate them. I don’t like crime but I hate innocent people being punished for crimes they didn’t commit.
Likewise, say it happens on a Monday. Your work is gonna wanna know where you are. They can definitely get away with firing you simply for getting arrested due to "At Will Employment" since you can't really go to work while in a jail cell.
While pleading the 5th protects you from the government forcing confessions or something similar, it doesn't save your job.
When they lie, those statements are constructed to pull informations out that would otherwise be hidden. If the lie is constructed with leading facts it might end up lead into false confessions (thats bad).
Investigator can include false info during the 'lie' to try to spot a false confession (covering for someone else, or even confusion and stress and wanting to get out of hostile environment).
Bad investigator will lie and force a confession facts onto suspect. As already mentioned some people might crack under stress of the situation and go into fight or flight - 'get me out of here I will tell you anything' - because they were fed actual crime facts, suspect will use those to construct a confession that will look like a real thing. That practice is something people should get fired over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull
I'm not asking for cops to be held to higher standards. Just equality under law. Either lower the bar for us or raise it for them, I don't care.
A higher bar would be nice. But equality under law would be a nice start.
Edit: Reading comprehension issue on my part...I wrote this comment before my first cup of coffee. As others have pointed out, the parent comment does mention pay, and I was wrong about the parent comment. I stand by the core message in my comment about pay in general, but clearly I missed the mark here.
>> I would argue that they are absolutely nowhere near paid enough
> The subject of pay has no bearing on . . . the parent comment
I don't know about you but the curriculum absolutely wasn't the same each year with my teachers, it couldn't be.
Beyond that, overtime is paid for cops and unpaid for teachers.
It's true that they don't do much work over the summer, though they have to come in 2-3 weeks in the summer more than the students.
If you feel teachers are undervalued, fine but teachers being underpaid and cops overpaid simply isn't logically consistent.
I'm not making this claim. But this statement has no logical problems, at least not as stated. Just because they might be paid a similar amount (or even if teachers are paid more) doesn't mean that the statement isn't logically consistent.
For example, Lebron James gets X and Nico Mannion gets paid Y (which is much less than X). Many still argue that Lebron is underpaid and Nico maybe overpaid. They deliver different value, and there's the notion of scarcity to provide the level service they provide.
If you think the average teacher (or some percentage of teachers) provides more value then the average cop, then you could make that statement and it not be logically inconsistent.
Unfortunately both have civil servant types of roles, which are hard to valuate in terms of financial impact.
I also think teacher's need to be held to a higher bar. Not that they do a bad job on average, but when they do there appears to be little accountability. But that's completely irrelevant to the article.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/374-seatt...
I know a cop outside of Redding, CA (not near any major cities), and he has more money than he knows what to do with.
That's a feature not a bug.
When you have a lot of unfair and unjust laws you need jackboots with no stake in the community in order to enforce them.
My state has some fancy words for justifying and obfuscating it but this is how they justify their policy of assigning state cops far away from their hometowns and residences for the first decade of their career. They want the cops to police the way the state wants them to police. They don't want them to think about what's best for the people being policed.
The police came to the door and arrested him on a hit and run charge, but he hadn't been in an accident. They browbeat him into confessing over the course of an hour but they didn't believe he'd actually been in an accident in the end because he couldn't even confess correctly, he didn't know where the accident had happened, the color or make of the car he supposedly hit, what time it happened etc.
We later found out that someone had hit and run this woman and she, and I quote "drove around until she found the person who did it." We found this out because she filed an insurance claim even after all of this-- AAA told her to go pound sand.
--
Also, police are just weird. Another family member wanted to be a police officer, and he did the physical and made it through the interview process-- part of which was explaining any tickets you had gotten. He had 3 tickets-- the interviewer agreed he had 3 tickets, he explains them all, then the interviewer asks, "What about the one after that?" He calmly explains that there were just the three. The interviewer persists, "But what about the one after that?" He calmly explains what "last" means and how it conflicts with the "one after that." This went on for a few minutes with the police offer pretending not to understand what was going on and being belligerent.
I suppose the point was to see if they could get him riled up? But it spooked him so much he declined the academy. They even called back every 3 months or so for years with better offers.
Taken alone this quote is frightening. A man seemingly died because an officer thought it was acceptable to play this ruse, that could have (and did this time) devastating effects.
Some mental health advocates have argued that that language is needlessly stigmatizing, and prevents people from talking about the root issues that can lead to suicide. Accordingly, many newspapers have changed their style guides.
People will just lie to make their lives easier.
In one day, I counted and was given like 3 lies from people in businesses. I mean they MAY have not know they were lying but these are relatively smart people who were making simple lies that just about anyone would know were lies.
And why they were lying was understandable, they just didn't want to discuss things with the customer, but still this idea of lying to make life easier doesn't sit well with me.
Even objective scientific facts and statistics are completely disregarded.
The consequences for being a dumbass are way less than the consequences for outright lying.
Since there's not way to prove one way or another it comes down to PRINCIPLES instilled in people to value the truth, principles from my limited observations that seem to be viewed as less important nowadays.
The truth is an obstacle to forcing ones values on the world.
Hence, why it seems to me like we're entering a 'post-truth society'.
Interesting side note however, according to the legal system, ignorance of the law is not an acceptable way out of crime, because the law, by necessity, places as high a value as possible on finding the truth.