Archive for February 29th, 2012

Important safety tip (#9 in a series).

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

Let us say, just for the sake of argument, that you are a police officer.

Let us say, also just for the sake of argument, that you like to go to bars in your off-duty hours and meet women (or men, depending on your particular gender bias).

Let us also say that you are at a bar one night, meet an attractive person of the appropriate gender, and you’d like to get their phone number and address.

Now, as a police officer, you have extraordinary access to look this kind of thing up. You may be tempted to make use of that access. You might want to wait until your next shift and then run your subject through police databases, the way the Mafia Cops did. If you’re desperate enough, you may think you can call up someone who is on duty, tell them you’re investigating a crime, and get information that way.

Julie Fisher told The Spokesman-Review that she was working as a waitress at Sullivan Scoreboard the night Edwards came in. She described his actions as “crazy.”
Fisher said Edwards made advances on almost every woman in the business. She said she found him in the women’s bathroom harassing “a woman trying to use the toilet” at closing time.

Yeah, that kind of desperate. Anyway, all of this may sound like a good idea at the time. It isn’t.

Because when the police department gets a complaint from the woman whose door you were banging on early in the morning, they are going to fire your ass.

Extra bonus point 1: It also doesn’t help if you’ve spent 10 months on suspension, with pay, while the police department looks into your relationship with an “unlicensed bounty hunter”.

Extra bonus point 2: Guess the city and police department. Go on, guess.

I’m not generally a big fan of Justice Department supervision of police departments, but Spokane is starting to look like a place that needs adult supervision for their police department. Or maybe they just need to fire everyone and let the National Guard police the city while they rebuild the department from scratch?

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law, Safety, Stupid | Comments Closed

Ah, Spokane.

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

Garden city of Washington state.

Brad Thoma was a sergeant with the Spokane Police Department up until 2009. That year, he was charged with driving while intoxicated and hit and run: apparently, he hit a pickup with his personal vehicle and fled the scene.

Thoma received “deferred adjudication” in the case, which basically meant that if he kept his nose clean for a certain amount of time, the charges would go away. As part of the agreement, he had to have an ignition interlock installed on any vehicles he drove, according to state law at the time. This would be awfully inconvenient to put on a police car, so Thoma was offered a non-driving desk job. He turned down that offer, so the Spokane PD fired his butt.

Now we’re in 2012. Thoma, of course, complained after he was fired, and the “Washington State Human Rights Commission” negotiated a settlement in which Thoma would be rehired as a detective and get $275,000 in back pay.

The Spokane City Council, in their infinite wisdom, rejected the settlement.

And Thoma is suing, claiming he was discriminated against due to his disability, namely alcoholism.

If you want to read the FARK discussion, I’d recommend hitting yourself repeatedly with a ball peen hammer until the urge goes away. If it doesn’t go away, the thread is here.

And, yes, I usually don’t cover stuff that is on FARK, but:

1. Mike the Musicologist sent it to me as blog fodder, and

b. It reminded me of another former Spokane police officer that I hadn’t checked on recently. So how’s Karl F. Thompson Jr. doing these days? (You remember former officer Thompson, don’t you? He beat Otto Zehm to death.)

Well…

Here is a particularly noteworthy quote:

Although the state’s top police trainer concluded that the fatal 2006 confrontation with unarmed janitor Otto Zehm was indefensible, the department’s own instructors and the city’s legal advisers have insisted that Spokane police officers were justified and handled the encounter appropriately.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law | 1 Comment »

Skippy the Therapy Kangaroo.

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

This one goes out to Mike the Musicologist, who was a big fan of Skippy when he was younger.

So there’s a family in the Spring area (near Houston) that has a special needs child. (According to the press coverage, the child is 16 years old; the nature of her special needs is unspecified.)

In order to assist the child, the family got a service animal for her.

A service kangaroo.

And now the family’s HOA wants the kangaroo gone, asserting it is “not a household pet.”

I have a hard time deciding who to side with here. I don’t have a high opinion of most HOAs, but I figure they’re a choice you make when you buy a home. However, I question whether this is an enforceable requirement; what defines a “household pet”, and does Federal law trump the HOA restrictions when it comes to “service animals”?

On the other hand, getting your special needs child a vicious Australian animal (yes, I realize “vicious Australian animal” is redundant) as a “service animal” doesn’t exactly strike me as being the smartest thing in the world, either.

(Here’s the opening of “Skippy the Bush Kangaroo”. Apparently, you can get the first season on DVD, at least in some parts of the world.)

Edited to add: Actually, you can get the entire series on DVD, but it won’t do you much good unless you live in Australia or have a region-free DVD player.

Posted in Clippings, IANAL, Law, TV | Comments Closed