Donald Trump spent a portion of his day today defending the police forces in the United States, just miles away from the spot where George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police office less than three months ago.
And given that Donald himself is all about burying evidence and hiding the truth, we may have just found out why he’s so eager to protect these folks.
ProPublica, a “nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power”, recently took a deep dive into the New York Police Department, after a 21-year-old black male was lifted up and slammed to the ground by an NYPD officer and filed a complaint with New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board.
However, CCRB was quickly met with less than full cooperation from the police force.
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Of the seven body cams worn by police officers during the incident, only one was handed over to CCRB — with NYPD claiming that they were withholding the rest to protect the privacy of the teenage boy that was involved in the incident. The one camera’s footage that was turned over just so happened to be of after the black male was already handcuffed.
CCRB shared their case summary with the now-retired judge who originally ordered that body cams be used by NYPD officers, Shira Scheindlin, who replied, “This just seems like contempt. I understand privacy concerns. But they’re refusing to meet their obligations.”
The ProPublica report reads:
Despite its legal obligations, the NYPD has been withholding significant evidence and undermining investigations of alleged abuse. It has stopped sharing a wide variety of paper records and has been redacting the names of potential witnesses from others without explanation. For two months this year, it allowed officers to refuse to be interviewed by CCRB investigators. And, critically, it often doesn’t produce body-worn camera footage.
An internal CCRB memo obtained by ProPublica enumerates roughly a dozen kinds of records withheld or redacted across the board: warrants, arrests records, documents listing who was in station house cells — key for finding witnesses — even officer injury reports.
People in this nation have spent the last three months in the streets of this country protesting just this. The police in this country feel that they’re not beholden to any rules or laws. They simply do as they wish. Whether it’s withholding evidence of their own wrongdoing or kneeling on the neck of an unarmed black man in the street.
And it’s high time we put a stop to it.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/AdmiralHalsey under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
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