The Police Lie. All the Time. Can Anything Stop Them?
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/police-testilying.htmlChristopher Parham was grocery shopping for his boss when Henry Daverin, a plainclothes NYPD officer, approached him. Daverin accused Parham of driving recklessly on an illegal scooter without a helmet; a few minutes later, Parham was writhing in pain on the sidewalk outside. What happened during those few minutes was a matter of dispute. The NYPD said that Parham, a Black 19-year-old, had violently resisted arrest. Daverin and his colleagues said that they did not use force against him even though Parham had gruesome Taser burns all across his back.
Then surveillance video of the episode emerged—and proved that nearly every detail of the NYPD’s account was false. Parham had immediately cooperated with Daverin; he did not resist arrest. Nonetheless, Daverin and his colleagues had assaulted Parham, tackling him to the ground, then Tasing him over and over again. After Parham’s attorneys released the video—and his local representatives raised concerns—the district attorney dropped all charges. Daverin, who had been named in at least 10 other misconduct lawsuits, was never disciplined, either for brutalizing Parham or for lying about it. Two years later, he remains on the force.
The police reaction to George Floyd’s murder, as well as the resulting nationwide protests, introduced many Americans to the fact that law enforcement officers lie. After officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, the Minneapolis Police Department issued a statement falsely claiming that Floyd “physically resisted officers” and excluding the fact that Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. When Buffalo police officers violently shoved a peaceful 75-year-old man, their department falsely asserted that the victim “tripped and fell” during “a skirmish involving protesters.”
This tendency to lie pervades all police work, not just high-profile violence, and it has the power to ruin lives. Law enforcement officers lie so frequently—in affidavits, on post-incident paperwork, on the witness stand—that officers have coined a word for it: testilying. Judges and juries generally trust police officers, especially in the absence of footage disproving their testimony. As courts reopen and convene juries, many of the same officers now confronting protesters in the street will get back on the stand.
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total detachment from our government. Capitalism and consumerism pretty much occupy people's hearts, minds and souls these days, with no time to care about law enforcement unless it involves a member of our family. Even then, it's almost impossible to challenge the system.
We have divorced ourselves from holding those working for our trusted institutions and assumed they are infallible. That applies to many institutions including churches, corporations and government functions such as law enforcement. An even better example is our system of jails and prisons where once people are locked up, inmates and the treatment they receive are forgotten (again, unless it's a member of our family).
I suspect the ultimate answer is to restructure most of these institutions crucial to our peaceful existence so that citizen involvement is required, not optional or based on need. I'm thinking review boards consisting of rotating groups of citizens and professionals that have the freedom to question everything and the authority to force changes as required, but in cooperation with the affected city, county or state boards and councils.
It should be practical to charge cops, preachers and corporate executives with malpractice just the same as lawyers and doctors.
However, such a idealistic system would be almost impossible to implement in our current atmosphere of political and social division.
KY rant done......
Bottom line is that people need to care, to give a damn...they need empathy. There's a chemical for that. 
