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The Los Angeles Police Department officer who blogs for various conservative political sites using the pseudonym Jack Dunphy has two interesting observations about that use-of-force incident where the handcuffed woman was thrown to the ground in the parking lot of a Del Taco in Tujunga.
My sense of Dunphy is that, on any controversy about an LAPD officer' actions, he's going to rush to defend the thin blue line against any criticism from the outside. In this case, he surprises.
For reasons not the least bit apparent on the videotape, one of the officers, reportedly a 22-year veteran, swings her violently by the arm and slams her to the ground. The second officer, a rookie, merely looks on as though bewildered at what he has just witnessed. Ms. Jordan suffered what must have been painful scrapes and bruising on her face, shoulders, and chest....
I don’t know any of the officers involved, but my sympathies are with the rookie, who has been out of the academy only three or four months and as such, was all but powerless to prevent his tenured partner from losing his temper and placing both their jobs in jeopardy. Like most police officers, I can recall being a rookie and working with senior officers whose fuses were shorter than they should have been, and I can recall finishing my shift with some of them and being thankful that they hadn’t done anything that would have had me fired or indicted....There may emerge some evidence that will serve to justify slamming a handcuffed woman face first to the pavement, but no reasonable cop who views that tape can imagine it happening. Let the investigations begin, let the chips fall where they may, and let justice be served.
And on Chief Charlie Beck removing the captain of Foothill division for mishandling the incident, Dunphy says the captain's mistake was in not making sure Beck knew about the incident before Channel 4 did.
Chief Charlie Beck, like any police chief, prefers to get his bad news from an internal source rather than from some pesky reporter. When controversy erupts, Beck likes to have his facts at the ready when the inevitable media inquiries begin. He also likes to be able to say that if any corrective action is called for, it has already begun. So when a reporter for L.A.’s KNBC started asking questions about a videotaped arrest in which a woman was slammed to the ground not just once but twice, the second time while in handcuffs, Chief Beck was in the uncomfortable position of having to say, “Huh?”
Interesting and sounds plausible.
