|
31 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Judas Syndrome, January 20, 2000
Peace Officer, a person emotionally sound with a desire to protect the weak from the more powerful and unjust people and to regulate the conduct of all people in order to level the playing field of life, utilizing the law fairly and equally.Stolen Lives brings together information, that by it's numbers should make everyone act not just think about the tally. In 1966, my first year in Law Enforcement as a beat cop, I worked with a senior patrolman who knew of a black couple living in an apartment in an exclusive white neighborhood. Each night he would drive by and put his spotlight in their window. After my last night under his training he told me why he was doing it.Later he shot a man under questionable circumstances, joined the fire department and retired. Last year 1999, he began a five year sentance for killing a petty theft suspect in a shopping mall parking lot as an ordinary citizen. Throughout my career I was aware of seven killings where men in blue ran up and down the stairs at PAB talking to the Chief of Detectives, District Attorney and most importantly the City Attorney before restructuring the final account of the killings. A thirteen year old boy playing with his friend running up the street ducking in and out of the shadows to hide when an enebriated off duty police detective fired his 44 magnum from his apartment porch hitting the boy in the head. While the child lay dying, the policeman took off with a friend and changed the barrel and firing pin on his gun and remained away on a fishing trip. A black IBM executive killed running away from a police officer who always talked about capping, dusting and popin people and who with great pride would show you the dryed blood on his patrol car hood from the early morning arrest. The seventeen year old shot in the back while wearing only a white t-shirt and levis and the officers coming to briefings throughout the day explaining their act while exhibiting their empty bullet belt loops like a western gunfighter. The officer fired and repeatedly rehired who, no matter how far away his beat was, would always end up across town on a "man with a gun call" and eventually be the officer who killed the violent suspect, over and over again even when he was an officer in L.A. and had been fired there. I could go on but the point is that as a civilian I watched as a mentally ill man on a roof was shot by an officer on the ground because he had a cork screw in his hand. Just before going on the roof his sargeant said "if he comes toward me cap him". In a Days Inn in Monterey California a kid was shot because he had a "stabbing instrument".I didn't see it that way. The book is asking you what happened and what is happening? At the end of my career I had never hit a person with a nightstick, shot anyone or physically harmed anyone and my Internal Affairs file was empty, yet I was a Viet Nam Veteran before becoming a police officer and was everywhere, Berkley, SRI, S.F. State and face to face with the Black Panthers and the Hells Angels during some of their most riotous times. I even followed, stopped and cited 217 hells Angels on a freeway with the help of the CHP without incident or even having one of the citations contested. This book has made me think deeply about the repeated conduct all over the country and the failure of the establishment, out of fear of retaliation,to punish and make examples of these very disturbed police officers who kill people. The book is an excellent example of what I saw go unabated during my career and the conduct is not new as much as it is spreading.
|
by Jill Nelson
by Randall Kennedy
by Heather Mac Donald
