Police
do lie, and often. Those who accept what police officers say as the
God’s honest truth are likely to get their feelings hurt at
some point. While many reporters working the crime beat simply rely
on the police department press releases to get to the “truth”
- and copy and paste the police statements into their articles - the
Uvalde, Texas, massacre, has revealed what many in the Black
community and other communities of color have known since forever.
Cops
have been known to lie routinely, and these lies have cost many
lives.
As
coffins
are being prepared with Superman, Transformers logos and cartoon
dinosaurs for the Latinx children who died in Uvalde, the police who
bear responsibility for their deaths by doing nothing to intervene
are planning the coverup. In a state with a long history of lynching
people of Mexican descent and a predominantly Mexican-American town
run by a racist white man
who could be mistaken for a Klansman, it should be no surprise that
the Uvalde police care little about dark-skinned, Spanish-speaking
children. This, even as some of the police officers are themselves
Hispanic, in a town that is 82
percent Hispanic.
Since
the tragic mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead
and over a dozen wounded from a gunman’s AR-15 weapon, the
statements and behavior on the part of law enforcement make no sense.
Nothing adds up here. Officials claimed police
had confronted the gunman
before he entered the school; then they backtracked on that version
of events. The school police chief claimed the standoff was a
“barricaded
subject situation”
and refused to go in and save the children, even as students were
calling 911 for help from inside the classroom. Uvalde police even
tried to shift the blame by claiming a teacher
left a door open
and allowed the shooter to enter, a claim that turned out to
be false
after a lawyer for the teacher in question disputed the account.
No
one understands why the police blocked parents from entering the
school to collect their kids - harassing and threatening to arrest
some parents - when law enforcement stood around and refused to act.
Yet, some officers reportedly went inside the school to retrieve
their own children.
The
cops in Uvalde have told so many falsehoods that even the deceitful
and diabolical
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he was “livid”
and “misled”
by the police account of events. Meanwhile, the Uvalde police are
no longer cooperating
with the investigations underway, and the police chief said they will
explain themselves “when the families quit grieving.”
We
have seen this before. The Uvalde shooting is a reminder that when
lives are at stake and after lives have been taken, the police will
always try to spin the situation in their favor and place themselves
in the best possible light.
Sometimes,
the police report does not match the video. When, in 2015, North
Charleston officer Michael Slager shot Walter
Scott
in the back like a runaway slave, Slager claimed Scott was reaching
for the officer’s taser. However, the video proved otherwise.
Police
will lie to children for the purpose of locking them up. The NYPD
coerced the five teens known as the Central Park Five into confessing
to the brutal 1985 rape and beating of a white woman. They spent
years behind bars for a crime they did not commit because the police
lied
to the boys.
The cops made the teens believe they were merely witnesses to a crime
and told them they would go home if they implicated
the other teens.
Brian
Encinia - the state trooper who stopped Sandra
Bland
for failing to signal a lane change and arrested her before she was
found dead in a Waller County, Texas jail cell - was charged with
perjury for allegedly lying in the police report following her
arrest. The charge was dropped when Encinia agreed to forfeit his
police license.
Another
classic case of lying cops is the police execution of Laquan McDonald,
shot 16 times by Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke in 2014. The
police report justified the shooting of McDonald by claiming the teen
committed an aggravated assault against the officer with a knife. At
least 16 police officers were involved in the cover-up to hide the
facts, according
to a report
from Chicago’s inspector general. False
statements
from police served to “mischaracterize the events leading up to
the McDonald shooting, and to thereby bolster a false narrative which
might offer justification for the shooting,” said the report.
The report also found the officers not only made up the details but
would not have been able to hear any conversation between McDonald
and Van Dyke based on where they were standing during the
interaction. As a result, cops
were fired for lying
in the case.
According
to a report
from the National Registry of Exonerations, lying police and
prosecutors are one reason why Black people convicted of murder are
50 percent more likely to be innocent than others convicted of
murder, and innocent Black people are 12 times more likely to be
convicted of drug offenses than innocent white people. Since 1989,
3,149 innocent people have been exonerated after spending a total of
more than 27,080 years in prison. In 35 percent of the cases, police
officers committed misconduct. “They were responsible for most
of the witness tampering, misconduct in interrogation, and
fabricating evidence - and a great deal of concealing exculpatory
evidence and perjury at trial,” the report said.
And
the police officers who stand up to corrupt and lying cops receive
death threats and are punished and ostracized, and the department
will
not protect them.
Former NYPD detective Frank Serpico, who was shot in the face
possibly by other police after whistleblowing on police corruption
and racketeering, said that while cops once planted knives or guns at
a crime scene, now all they need to do to is justify the use of
deadly force by claiming their life was in danger or they acted in
self-defense. Using pure lies, police will invent the official
testimony that becomes part of a police after-action report. He calls
it “testi-lying.”
When
folks say you don’t understand that police officers have a
tough job, they make a good point. After all, lying is hard work.
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