COPS GO POWER MAD AND BADGE HEAVY

By Tom Moran

Howie, you were a cop for a long time. When’s the last time you heard or read about a white man being pulled from his Mercedes near his home on River Oaks Boulevard, being handcuffed, put on his face and had a police officer keep a knee on his neck for nine minutes?

Some of what we see is racism but a lot of what happens is that police officers go power mad and badge heavy and their departments let them get away with it. After all, they are THE LAW.

Take everyone’s favorite narc, Gerald Goines. Long before he lied on a search warrant affidavit and got two people killed, he was a blight on law enforcement.
In the early 1990s, I was representing a lot of indigent defendants and I saw a lot of police reports with Goines’s name on them. The typical scenario was that a group of black men would be standing in someone’s front yard about midnight talking. Goines would roll up, demand they produce picture IDs, then bust those who didn’t have them. Usually at least one would have a rock of crack on him.


The problem was that there is no law generally requiring a US citizen to carry any kind of ID except for special circumstances such as driving. And, by that time the Supreme Court had twice ruled that police had no general right to demand that anyone identify themselves unless there were facts that the person had committed or was about to commit a crime. And, the legislature passed a law saying no one has to identify (give their name, address and date of birth) themselves unless they are LAWFULLY detained or arrested.

Uniformly, the prosecutors would offer my client probation that day and I had to tell them their arrest was illegal and they could sit in jail for a few months to win or they could plead guilty and go home that day.

Was/is Goines a racist? Well, he’s African-American but he could still hate blacks who live in the Third or Fourth Ward. There’s no doubt that he was a badge heavy cop who didn’t give a damn what the law said.

He and a lot of other officers have a feeling of entitlement because they wear a badge and carry a gun.

In my opinion, police training and culture creates an “us or them” attitude coupled with police officers’ attitudes that the most important thing is “officer safety.” We saw a perfect example of this just last week when a Fort Bend County deputy sheriff shot and killed a uniformed Fort Bend deputy constable while both were searching a vacant house. The deputy sheriff saw something moving and he shot.

When I was a soldier, my soldiers had rules of engagement that generally prevented them from just firing up anything they thought might be a danger to them. In Iraq, where I did not serve, cell phones were used to set off IEDs. Should a US soldier be allowed to kill anyone making a call on a cell phone? I don’t think so.

I expect my police officers to do exactly what I expected soldiers under my command: make sure a potential target is a danger to you or others. Don’t just shoot. Yes, my soldiers were risking their lives by holding fire. I never expected my soldiers to get killed. I expected them to risk their lives. Why should police be different.

Police officers owe everyone they deal with a duty to treat them with respect. They aren’t going to get respect until they give it.

One last thought on feelings of entitlement by police officers. When I was a kid growing up in Austin, the man who lived two doors down was a retired Houston police officer. He was jealous of the veterans benefits my father received which he did not. He thought he should have gotten them because during World War II, he was deferred from the draft because he was a police officer patrolling Houston and risking his life every day.

On the other hand, he slept in his own bed every night along with his wife. He had access to three hot meals a day, hot showers and clean clothes. And, he got a pretty good pension from the City of Houston for the rest of his life.

In 1943, my father got on a ship not knowing where he was going and not knowing when — if ever — he would ever see my mother again. He was being sent someplace where there were people with tanks, aircraft, artillery, machine guns and rifles whose job was to kill him. Because of my father’s job and age, he wasn’t in the infantry and his war was still pretty reasonable when it came to danger and privations. On the other hand, he was in London when V-1 and V-2 rocket were dropping on the city.

After all these years, I’ve never gotten over that retired police officer’s feeling of entitlement.