Bullies with badges

30th July 2018   ·   0 Comments

By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor

About a decade ago, a buddy of mine shared a theory with me about the kind of people who become police officers. He said that for the most part, law enforcement agencies are comprised of bullies and cowards.

I was intrigued because no one had ever really analyzed it that way for me.

The bullies, he said, were the tough guys who always wanted to prove their manhood and exert dominance over others.

According to his theory, the bully cops on the street roamed their districts like neighborhood alligators — always on the lookout for prey. They got off on pushing people around and often shook down civilians who had done nothing wrong and confiscated their belongings, including cash, electronics and jewelry.

A young member of my extended family came face to face with a member of this ilk. One of these so-called bullies took it upon himself to destroy every CD in his car and dared him to file a report against him.

Since the July 5, 2016 officer-involved killing of Alton Sterling, a number of Baton Rouge residents have said that the officer who fatally shot the 37-year-old man six times and hurled profanities at him as he lay bleeding to death on the ground was a bully cop that terrorized the neighborhoods in his district.

On the other side is the coward, according to my buddy.

The coward may have never wanted to become a cop, but did so out of a false sense of duty to others in his or her family or because they didn’t think they had a lot of options.

The coward cop is afraid of his or her own shadow and shoots at anything that moves without hesitation.

He imagines that every cellphone, wallet, bottle of soda or set of keys is a gun and will empty his gun in a panic when he or she feels threatened.

Some years ago, African immigrant Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times by NYPD officers in the vestibule of his apartment building while reaching for his wallet.

Others, especially Black, Brown and poor people, are senselessly killed by police because they moved too slow, reached for vehicle registration papers, reached for their cellphone or looked at somebody wrong.

I thought about all of this last week when two NOPD rookies rightfully lost their jobs after allegedly beating up a Latino man at a bar who had made the mistake of thinking he could wear a camouflage T-shirt since he is a military veteran.

NOPD officers John Galman and Spencer Sutton, who had graduated from the police academy just seven months ago, encountered Jorge Gomez at the Mid-City Yacht Club and questioned him about the camouflage shirt the Latino man was wearing before allegedly assaulting him.

Gomez is reportedly still recovering from his injuries.

“He told me he was going to kill me, ‘You’re going to die, you’re going to die,’” Gomez, told FOX 8 News.

The officers were fired last week and were initially charged with simple battery. It is likely those charges will be upgraded since the NOPD indicated that it is investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reportedly also investigating the incident to determine whether federal hate crime charges are warranted.

All of this could have been avoided if these two young officers had learned at some point in their lives to mind their own business and subscribed to the notion that law enforcement officers are not above the law.

They don’t have the constitutional right to bully, intimidate, terrorize or brutalize civilians who are not acting outside of the law.

While it is too late to save their budding careers as law enforcement officers in the NOPD, perhaps their “ordeal” will teach others some valuable lessons about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

For Galman and Sutton, they might somehow learn the folly of trying to determine and decide who is worthy of donning military clothing and who is a real patriot or American.

This article originally published in the July 30, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.