A Maryland police officer was convicted on Friday of charges that he joined a mob’s Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and hurled a smoke bomb and other objects at police officers guarding a tunnel entrance.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden heard two days of trial testimony without a jury this week before he found Montgomery County Police Officer Justin Lee guilty of two felonies and three misdemeanors. The judge, who also acquitted Lee of two other misdemeanors, is scheduled to sentence him on Nov. 22.
Lee, 26, ignited and threw a smoke bomb into the tunnel entrance on the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace, where a mob of rioters attacked a group of outnumbered police officers. The device struck a police officer’s riot shield and filled the mouth of the tunnel with a large plume of smoke, prosecutors said.
I will reply, because I don’t agree with your perception and the implications of your comment.
In work? Literally never. Not once. Everything is recorded in BWV and is disclosable in court. Documentation and usually a statement is required for the exercise of any legal power. It’s all auditable. We even had community engagement groups who watch videos of incidents chosen at random by a computer, and I’ve had several of mine pulled up for feedback by them.
Putting aside the obvious ethical reasons why I haven’t done that and wouldn’t want to. Why would I risk my career and income anyway?
Never. Not once. I have reported multiple colleagues in the past for doing things which I thought were questionable, and those concerns were always appropriately actioned by management. I faced no consequences from my peers or the organisation for doing so.
Your presumptions are incorrect. Maybe they are correct where you live, I don’t know, but they’re not my experience at all. For what it’s worth, I’m not American.
I’m not saying these things don’t happen and as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m not saying modern policing is without issues. As someone who has worked in the criminal justice system for years with multiple degrees in the area, your perception of how things actually work in real life and how those problems manifest are not correct, and your judgements towards individuals (including myself) are totally unfair and without nuance.
I’m not sure how things work in your country. You’ve helpfully neglected to even state what country that is (which conveniently makes it difficult to find examples of the state of policing in your country).
This article is discussing American police and so that’s the context of my statements. We don’t do police accountability or oversight here, so your counterpoint doesn’t lend much weight.
I’ve intentionally left my country ambiguous to highlight that saying ALL of any group is a ridiculous statement, because I could be from anywhere in the world and somehow you think you know enough to apply that statement to me and my former colleagues.
So you’ve waded into an article about the criminal behavior of an American policeman, found a comment calling for police accountability in the US and posted some unverifiable anecdotal “evidence” that only qualifies their statement in the vaguest sense, but is aimed to plant uncertainty and doubt in the sentiment that police as a whole are bastards and need better oversight and accountability…
You very much appear to be one of the “good” cops that will do anything to minimize the crimes of his bad brothers. I would say that maybe ACAB only applies to the rotten societies like ours, but you are falling over yourself to cast yourself in the same lot as the bad cop in the article and to defend the profession. That’s not making the statement you think it is.