And Kelly Thomas? http://m.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Upda...re-acquitted-in-killing-of-homeless-man-video
Somewhat counter intuitive, as I have grown older, I have lost respect for uniformed officers. I have had four interactions in last two years, and they would all get the grade of F-. Three involved vandalism against our cars, and the other, a car that t-boned us and fled the scene. I am appalled at the level to which the law enforcement community has sunk. I would not count on them for ANY HELP WHATSOEVER. I am only basing my opinion on my experience, and nothing else, IMHO if you wear a police uniform you are WORTHLESS. Oh and if this pisses some of you off, then wait for this. Massive racism in most police forces. Massive.
It's been my experience that when you need em they aren't there, when you don't want em they're everywhere.
Poor training IMO.. Multiple shots for no reason. http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2014/03/07/dnt-canada-dashcam-truck-crash.ctv.html
I think I have a rather unique perspective on this. I, like most everyone out there, have encountered cops outside of the courtroom. In that situation it's about 50-50 good cop bad cop. In fact, the last time I got a ticket the cop was pretty much a dick even though I was dressed in a suit and he stopped me during the day in a low crime area. Inside the courtroom it's entirely different. The vast majority of cops I encounter professionally are reasonable and pleasant. The only two I had problems with were one (when I was prosecuting) who testified that he was able to see a hand to hand drug transaction from about 200 yards away because "I have better than perfect vision" who got pissy when I called him out on it later off the stand. The other (when I was defending) got all kinds of upset when I asked him routine questions during a preliminary hearing, but I later found out that he and his wife were having some problems so I gave him a pass for that day. Otherwise, I generally don't have any problems with cops while I'm working. To illustrate, in the past few weeks I raked one cop over the coals pretty well during a murder trial where my theory was that the police department didn't do their job and arrested my guy only because he was the easy suspect. A couple of days later I had lunch with that same cop. Then this week I had a cop argue with the ADA that a couple of my clients shouldn't have been arrested on the armed robbery charge they were stuck with and that's probably going to help get them out of jail. I guess the moral is this: when cops are interacting with the public at large and are generally unsupervised they can be a-holes but when they're dealing with someone they view as a professional who will hold them accountable they're just folks.
