Wondering what my law enforcement friends think of this,... from the article,... WNYC looked at over 51,000 cases where someone was charged with resisting arrest since 2009. They found that 40 percent of those cases — over 20,000 — were committed by just 5 percent of all the police officers on the force. And 15 percent of officers accounted for a majority of all resisting arrest charges. Why resisting arrest cases matter The upshot of this data is that charging people with resisting arrest is something most cops do very rarely, and a few cops do a lot. Heres why that matters: if a cop is routinely hauling people into court for resisting arrest, he might be taking an overly aggressive attitude toward civilians. A police officer might even, as police accountability expert Sam Walker told WNYC, use the criminal charge to cover up his use of excessive force: Theres a widespread pattern in American policing where resisting arrest charges are used to sort of cover - and that phrase is used - the officers use of force, said Walker, the accountability expert from the University of Nebraska. Why did the officer use force? Well, the person was resisting arrest. That pattern held up in the case of Donald Sadowy, a Brooklyn police officer whos the subject of the WNYC article. Sadowy has more than 20 resisting arrest cases since 2009 — putting him in the 98th percentile, or higher, among all police. Meanwhile, over the last two years, Sadowys been sued 10 times for excessive force.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 15:48:41 +0000
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