Your Daily Update on Police Impunity

Even Jon Stewart cannot handle this. No joke here.

The New York Daily News, a paper not generally considered a friend of the minority community, nor an adversary of the police department, is livid over the refusal of a Staten Island grand jury to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo for the killing of Eric Garner:

The grand jury’s vote to exonerate the police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner on Staten Island has glaring earmarks of a gross miscarriage of justice.

The ruling is painfully far harder to understand than the Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict for the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

To a large degree, the evidence against Officer Daniel Pantaleo was widely scrutinized by the public in the form of a on-scene video posted to the Internet by the Daily News. The image of Pantaleo wrestling Garner to the ground with his arm around Garner’s neck was horrifying.

Even granting that a cop has wide latitude in using force to make an arrest, Pantaleo’s sudden aggressiveness was unnecessary. The fact that it entailed a chokehold only reinforced the excessive quality of his actions.

After the medical examiner found that a chokehold and chest compression led to Garner’s death, the connection between cause and effect seemed enough to many people not only to indict but to convict Pantaleo.

Deep, intense skepticism about the grand jury’s ruling is fully warranted — while recognizing that no one other than the panel and Staten Island prosecutors have reviewed all the evidence and matched the facts against the law.

And then we have news on the shooting of 12-year old Tamir Rice.

It appears that, before he was hired as an officer by the Cleveland PD, Tim Loehmann was fired by the Independence, Ohio police department because he was mentally unfit:

Tim Loehmann, the Cleveland police officer who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice to death last month, resigned from a smaller Ohio police force in 2012 after being found unfit for duty. Among other obviously disqualifying behavior, Loehmann was "distracted" and "weepy" during his firearm qualification session, according to just-released records from his brief tenure with the Independence police department.

"He could not follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor recollections, and his handgun performance was dismal," Independence Deputy Chief Jim Polak wrote in a letter on November 29, 2012, according to records obtained by the Northeast Ohio Media Group. "For these reasons, I am recommending he be released from the employment of the city of Independence. I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies."

Polak also wrote that he believed there would certain situations during which Loehmann would "not react in the way instructed."

………

The problems at Independence erupted on Nov. 28, 2012, the records say. Loehmann showed up "sleepy and upset" for a 6 a.m. state gun qualification session.

Tinnierello wrote that Loehmann "was distracted and was not following simple instructions" at the shooting range.

At one point, he went to the back of the range to reload his magazine and could not return to the line where he was supposed to shoot from, Tinnierello wrote. Loehmann appeared to be crying and was emotionally upset so Tinnierello said they would stop the exercise for the day.

Seriously?

This guy got hired by the Cleveland PD?

I would not hire him as a pastry chef!

Repeat after me:  Police cannot police themselves.

Allowing them to do so is an invitation to corruption and incompetence.