Obviously sex and guns are things that tend to get a lot of attention in America, and when you combine the two in such a picture-perfect way – including, of course, the opportunity to run a gratuitous shot of a smiling blonde woman with an exposed midriff and tiny miniskirt and still calling it news – you’re likely to find a wire story with legs long enough that it’ll run in Kansas City. But this story of Midland County sheriff's deputies being fired and/or suspended without pay for handing a service weapon – an assault rifle, no less – to a waitress at a Round Rock restaurant and asking her to pose for a “Chicks Who Love Guns”-style photo was noteworthy to me for a reason that had less to do with the picture of the pretty lady in question, or even the potential public safety hazard that would be caused if it became standard operating procedure for sheriff’s deputies throughout the land to turn over their assault rifles to any woman unfortunate enough to find herself in an occupation that required her to flirt with them in order to make a living.

No, what I found noteworthy about this is that it’s pretty much the only time I can remember the police actually arresting each other.

I’ve been reading lately about cases like Daniel Lozano, who was exonerated of attempted murder charges thanks to the work of a private investigator who proved that the officer who arrested him lied about whether Lozano fired first. Or Dewey Pressley, the Florida officer who was caught lying on camera about the cause of an accident, and whose punishment, after weeks of public outcry that followed the video becoming a YouTube sensation and national news, was a brief paid suspension. Or the case in Philadelphia, where a police officer assaulted a woman in a convenience store – again on camera – and who then sent three fellow officers in to the store in an attempt to convince the store’s proprietor to hand the tape over to them. None of the officers who tried to retrieve the tape were found to have committed any wrongdoing, and punishment for the assaulting officer was left undetermined.

And then there’s this case in Round Rock.

Williamson County gets a tough rap for being particularly unyielding when it comes to crime, and that’s rarely something that we celebrate. From my observations and experience, that too often translates into kids who’re busted with a joint having the book thrown at ‘em, as they used to say.

But it is kind of refreshing to hear that these deputies, after requesting “some form of professional courtesy”, were instead told that it didn’t work that way, and arrested.

No charges were filed, but that’s reasonable – they didn’t actually commit a crime, just a major professional and ethical (not to mention public safety) violation. The punishments ranged from a letter of reprimand for the deputy who was part of the party, but who opted to stay inside rather than go out for the pictures, to short suspensions without pay for the ones who watched as it happened, to firing for the one who gave the assault rifle over to the waitress.

That seems more or less fair to me. The thing that seems to get lost in all of the thin blue line, “professional courtesy” concepts is that the people who are being policed need to trust the people charged with policing them. If we’re to accept that the police can shoot at us and fabricate a police report, or rear-end our cars and claim in a sworn affidavit that we hit them, and then face no punishment more severe than a brief paid vacation, respect for their authority diminishes. Witness this comment from the Statesman article about the PI in the Lozano case:

Last time I was called for jury duty I stated clearly and unequivocally that everything cops say, whether under oath or not, are very likely to be lies. Most of the other prospective jury members nodded in agreement when I said it. It’s clearly a majority opinion among the populace now. The police have totally lost credibility in this state. It’s going to take a very long time before the police regain any sort of credibility in Texas.

Now, I’ll admit that this case in particular is more or less a circus. Like I said – I don’t really care about the picture (though I do feel kinda icky about the inherent power imbalance of a group of police all joining in to convince a young woman to take a sexy photo for them) and I suspect that the woman, despite being handed an assault rifle as thou gh it were a toy, did not really represent much of a threat to public safety. (The presence of the three other deputies, who presumably had kept their weapons, probably negated any threat she may have posed if it had all been a clever ploy on her part to wreak havoc throughout the streets of Round Rock with a machine gun.) But it does help a bit to know that there are consequences – at least some of the time – for police who break the rules. If we can trust that the police are being held to a standard, it serves to restore some of the credibility they’re lacking. Circus or not, that’s a good thing.

Labels: abuse of power, cameras, police violence, recording, williamson county

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