Give Me Convenience Or…

While there are many stories I cover through the National Police Misconduct News Feed each day that are tales of police officers who have become corrupt or actively chose to do horrific things with the authority given to them, many more of these stories are commentaries on how police officers, and those who are supposed to be responsible for their behavior, choose to do bad things for nothing more than the simple sake of convenience.

Instead of using the due diligence that one would expect of those who are empowered to take away our freedoms or our lives, they instead choose to bypass that responsibility for the sake of expediency, all at the peril of those they are duty-bound to protect.

While such stories don’t appear to have the same impact as those detailing the fall of an officer from grace or of a sociopath who became an officer just to serve that pathological desire to cause harm… they are still just as devastating in their results, and at times even more egregious than tales of outright malicious abuse:

Investigations Are SOOOO Inconvenient
Miami Beach Florida’s police department recently showed how they value convenience above public safety when they returned an officer to duty just four days after he had shot an unarmed tourist to death under highly questionable circumstances.

Even though his description of events was called into doubt by several witnesses, and now video, he was still returned to active duty on the streets without a proper investigation into the highly publicized incident… where he promptly shot another suspect to death that very same day he was returned to active duty.

Just Shoot Her Already
In Honolulu Hawaii police officers tasered and shot a mentally ill homeless woman that they claimed had lunged at them with a metal skewer. But initial witness accounts, and now a video, appears to contradict their claims.

The woman’s defense attorney claims a taser-mounted camera recorded the woman taking 14 steps back away from officers when one officer impatiently says, “Just shoot her already”

…which is what they did as both the taser deploying and gunshots are heard shortly thereafter. The woman spent 22 days in the hospital recovering from being shot in the stomach and is still in jail on charges of making terroristic threats… not because officers were at risk, but because they couldn’t be inconvenienced to patiently deal with the situation.

Don’t Care How, I Want It Now!
A Denver Colorado police officer has been suspended while the Aurora Police Department investigates allegations made by a McDonald’s employee about an incident that occurred on May 21.

It appears as though the Denver officer grew impatient with McDonald’s employees while waiting for his order in the drive-thru and felt as though they might be ignoring him… So, the officer allegedly flashed his badge to one of the employees at the drive-thru window and then, when that didn’t get him his food right there and then, he pointed his service pistol through the window in a threatening manner.

The incident is being called nothing more than a case of criminal “menacing”, but since he then drove away without paying, one would assume that if they weren’t officers they would have been charged with armed robbery instead.

It Takes Longer To Think Than To Tase
Peoria Illinois police officers are accused of needlessly and repeatedly tasering a severely autistic man with an IQ of 17 because he would not obey commands fast enough when officers arrived to help settle him down at a halfway house where he had attacked some staff members while in an agitated state.

Not to be inconvenienced by trying to understand how he might not respond well to aggressive officers barking commands, they conveniently jolted him 12 times within a period of time only spanning 80 seconds, (with the average taser jolt lasting about 5 seconds, that’s a debilitating shock every 1.7 seconds), which meant he never had a chance to obey commands until they were done shocking him nearly a minute and a half later.

In other words, they felt so inconvenienced by the mentally challenged man that they didn’t even give him a chance to comply with their commands in between each shock with their taser.

Give Me Convenience… Or Else.
Hurricane Utah police also seem to have relied on the convenience of the taser over the inconvenient bother of trying to calm an agitated man experiencing a psychotic episode when, according to witnesses, they responded to a naked mentally ill man at the side of a highway by tasering him even though he posed no immediate threat to anyone at the time.

Details from that incident now indicate that the officer who tasered Brian Cardell, who was suffering from bipolar disorder, only waited for 42 seconds after arriving on the scene to taser Cardell, whom witnesses say didn’t appear to have made any threatening movements before being shocked.

Cardell would likely still be alive and nobody would have been harmed if the officer simply secured the scene until the medicine Cardell’s pregnant wife had given him had time to take effect… instead the two jolts he received from the taser resulted in his death.

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Time and time again, we see officers use the tools they are given as weapons of convenience, as tools of first resort, and potentially deadly implements of expediency… and the real people suffer the consequences for it.

The next time you read about or see a story like the ones above, ask yourself this…

Is your life still worth more than than a police officer’s convenience and expediency?