Fuel for the Fire
June 6th, 202059 Buffalo Cops Failed to Understand the Memo
The reasons America is devouring itself right now are not natural, and it’s counterproductive to focus too much on natural reasons. We are having problems because we turned away from God and rejected the Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to look at the symptoms as long as you don’t misdiagnose the disease.
Today something very unpleasant happened. I found my self agreeing with a Cuomo and even Chris Hayes, who could arguably be said to represent 75% of what is disappointing in current American males.
I saw the video of the Buffalo incident. An old man approached riot police and waved a cell phone while he was talking to them, and one of them shoved him hard. He fell backward, and immediately, so much blood poured out of his right ear it formed a puddle beside his head. He’s alert and in stable condition, and he is urging people to react peacefully.
Here’s a Youtube of the incident.
I guess it’s a good thing the victim doesn’t appear to be black. BLM doesn’t take much notice of police brutality toward white people, so maybe the incident won’t stir the violence up very much.
Am I upset about the attack itself? Sure, but it’s not what I sat down to write about. According to the news, the two cops involved in the attack were suspended. Then 57 cops resigned from the unit…in support of the attackers.
That’s the part of the story that should bother people the most. The cops will always hurt a certain number of people without justification, no matter what we do. I accept that. But I don’t accept the culture of cops who stand up for other cops who are clearly criminals.
The cops who quit supported two criminals, and they also decided it was okay to diminish their city’s ability to control rioters. What priorities. At least they’ll be welcome in the sack race at the department’s next picnic.
As a lawyer, I don’t ordinarily like to draw conclusions from news videos or early stories, because I generally don’t have enough evidence to make up my mind. For example, George Zimmerman shot a larger attacker in what was textbook self-defense, but if I had listened to the biased initial reports, I would have thought he was a murderer. There are exceptions, though. When a Cleveland cop leapt out of a car and shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice without trying to communicate with him or give him a chance to drop his toy gun, I said it was second-degree murder. It was too obvious to allow doubt. I’m also confident that what happened in Buffalo was a crime, and there is no excuse for backing up the men who committed it.
When I learn about cases like the one in Buffalo, I always think of the time I spent working with a DV prosecutor in Miami. She said she dealt with a lot of domestic violence cases involving male cops, and she said it was very hard to get anywhere with them because other cops obstructed her work and refused to cooperate. Yes, Miami cops–the people abused women were expected to call for help–stood up for men they knew to be wife-beaters. They didn’t do it because of the evidence. They did it simply because the wife-beaters were their co-workers.
Many people will get angry with you unless you side 100% with protesters, black people who are hurt by the police, or the police themselves. The truth is that it’s a complicated picture. Life isn’t a cartoon.
Rioting can never be excused, but on the other hand, police brutality is very real. Bad attitudes among cops are very common. How many times have you had an obnoxious cop treat you rudely? I rarely interact with the police, but it has happened to me on a number of occasions. How many times have you seen a cop give orders that go beyond what he knows he is authorized to command? This stuff is normal and widespread.
The police need to operate in the sunlight. Body cameras should be used every time they interact with us, and we should always be allowed to film and record them at work, except in unusual cases where information really needs to be restricted. There are still places where shooting video of the police can get you in legal trouble. That’s astounding, and if it doesn’t violate the letter of the First Amendment, it certainly conflicts with the spirit. The primary reason the First Amendment exists is to allow us to criticize the government.
I support the police. I know they are almost always right when people accuse them. I know their jobs are very hard and that our support is necessary if we expect them to get anything done. But the complaints we are hearing about them now weren’t fabricated from thin air. They arose from a long, consistent history of abuse.
The police are probably in the right in 95% of the incidents that draw accusations. In relative terms, they’re much less culpable than their accusers. But in absolute terms, they’re wrong too much of the time. Let’s go crazy and increase the figure to 98% for the sake of argument. How long would you expect your restaurant to stay open if you gave 2% of your customers food poisoning or you got angry and called 2% of your female customers sluts?
It’s not that hard to run an organization with a very low rate of employee misbehavior. Not in the world of business, anyway. It shouldn’t be any harder for the police. It should be easier, because we expect the police to be people of good character.
All this being said, I don’t think what I’m saying is very important. If we don’t address the supernatural roots of conflict, putting cameras on cops and passing new laws won’t improve things enough to matter.
The cops who committed the battery have been charged, so things could be worse.
June 7th, 2020 at 9:30 AM
Video from different angle show the well known community activist poking the cops with whatever is in his hand. Could be a cellphone or a bottle. Can’t tell. Rule #1 is you don’t poke or approach the police in any aggressive manner even if mild.
I suspect there is a lot more to this story so withhold judgement.
June 7th, 2020 at 11:15 AM
I’m comfortable with my conclusion. I will explain why.
1. His status as an agitator doesn’t mean anything, because it’s illegal to use excessive force on agitators.
2. The object in his hand is clearly visible, and it’s obviously a phone or small tablet. He doesn’t touch the officers with it. His left hand holds a bag which doesn’t appear to touch the officers. No reasonable finder of fact could conclude that he battered the officers.
3. Resigning from the unit was inexcusable. These men gave prosecutors ample reason to charge them, and the other cops, who supposedly support the rule of law and due process, should have been content to let the system work.
I don’t see any hope for a save.
It’s not like they intended for him to fall on the pavement and hit his head on it, but he was obviously spindly and feeble, and two strong young men pushed him backward forcefully at the same time, knowing it’s not safe to handle elderly people that way. They’re going to have to explain why they thought that was necessary.
June 7th, 2020 at 9:53 PM
I have to respectfully disagree with you about this incident. It looks like the police repeatedly told the guy to get back. Instead, he strides right up with something in his hands. It’s clear to you that it’s just a phone, but the police saw a man approach them and start poking around close to them…TOO close in a tense situation like this. The police did not hit him with a baton, they did not mace him, and they did not shoot him. The gave him a shove. The man lost his balance and went down hard. This was not assault.
June 7th, 2020 at 11:32 PM
The police were very close to him, so if I could see that he was holding a tablet or phone, they saw it much better. The notion that two strong young men in a group of strong young men were in any way frightened by a wispy old man waving a cell phone isn’t very plausible.
The other demonstrators were far away, and they were approached by one scrawny septuagenarian who, from his hunched back and unsteady gait, appears to have severe osteoporosis and poor balance. It was not a particularly perilous situation for the police. If you watch the whole video, you will see how calm they look. They weren’t dodging a hail of bottles.
As for shoving him not being a big deal, historically, in the case of battery, the slightest touch, if unwelcome, has been enough. At least that’s the case in civil law. You can be sued successfully for coming up behind a woman and pulling a Biden. In Florida, you can be convicted of a crime for unwanted touching. I don’t know what New York says about it, but it’s pretty unlikely New Yorkers are allowed to handle other people without permission. The law has been protecting our personal spaces very strictly ever since the days of the English common law. You can be sued for knocking a plate out of someone’s hand or punching his car while he’s inside it.
Americans are generally very ignorant about the strong protection the law gives us against battery and assault, and that’s very sad. Most people don’t even know assault is a crime.
In tort law, if you hurt someone who is particularly vulnerable, you have to eat the consequences even if you didn’t know about the vulnerability. I don’t know much about how it works in criminal law, but I do know that we pass special laws, such as those involving harm to the elderly and the very young, that provide harsher penalties for those who pick on people who are more likely to be injured seriously.
Classically, the term for making unwelcome contact with someone was “battery,” whereas “assault” referred to threats alone, but in New York, they call battery “assault.” I don’t know if you know it or not, but if I wave my fist at you from two feet away, it’s assault, in classical terms. The law doesn’t like physical expressions of rudeness.
The applicable New York statute says a person is guilty of second-degree assault (classical battery) if, “With intent to cause physical injury to a person who is sixty-five years of age or older, he or she causes such injury to such person, and the actor is more than ten years younger than such person.”
I am not a New York lawyer, but it doesn’t appear the defendants intended to injure this man, so it may be that they were overcharged. I may be wrong, because I have not researched “intent” in the context of New York criminal cases.
Third-degree assault seems to fit better. A person is guilty if he “recklessly causes physical injury to another person.”
Black’s, the standard legal dictionary, defines “recklessness” this way: “The state of mind accompanying an act, which either pays no regard to its probably or possibly injurious consequences.” It fits between negligence and intent to harm. It’s pretty obvious that if you push a weak old man backward on a hard sidewalk, he is likely to be injured.
It could be that these men were deliberately overcharged in order to provoke an acquittal. Maybe the prosecutor is trying to soothe the crowd while also bending the knee to the thin blue line. I don’t know. Maybe New York courts automatically allow people who are overcharged to be convicted of lesser included offenses.
June 8th, 2020 at 10:21 AM
The big problem with police is the unions.
Police with a history of abuse keep getting reassigned. Why is that?
The cops in Buffalo resign when two of their own are charged? That is behavior bred by unions.
June 9th, 2020 at 6:51 PM
Without disagreeing with your points, people are now saying this guy has a history of trying to get arrested and get out of being charged, and that his behavior–in close-ups, he’s clearly waving his phone at the two cops’ radios, basically trying to get it right up to within an inch or so of each of them–is supposedly an attempt to do something like get the frequencies they’re operating at so he or his allies can, I guess, listen in on the cops or something.
Hypothetically speaking, because I doubt that’s what happened here, if you walk up to someone who’s walking towards you, and you don’t get out of their way fast enough and they bump into you, who’s committed battery?
As for what you said about people’s ignorance of battery, there are some people who know exactly what it is. Back in the 80s when I was an ignorant, liberal high school kid in Boston, I went into Cambridge with a friend one Saturday night. There was a guy who’d preach on a corner, and college kids loved to crowd around him and yell in his face and stuff. I am ashamed to say I joined in for a few minutes, but afterwards I felt bad about it and never did it again, but there were people around there making sure to tell everyone to go ahead and get as close as they wanted to yell and drown him out, but to make sure to under no circumstance to actually touch him. Back when the Westboro Baptist Church was a going concern, people counterprotesting them also made sure to tell everyone not to ever touch one of them because apparently several of them were lawyers and were just salivating at the idea–supposedly they tried to deliberately enrage people in the hopes someone would take a swing at them.
Those are kind of specific circumstances, though, and based on a lot of youtube videos of protests I am prepared to believe you that most people don’t know it.