Brickbat: Baton Bashing

Former Los Angeles police officer Juan Anthony Carrillo was sentenced to a year in prison after pleading guilty to depriving a person's rights under the color of law. Carrillo arrived to assist another officer who had detained a man walking on the grounds of the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center at 4 a.m. Prosecutors say the man was holding a clear glass pipe that the officer suspected was drug paraphernalia. Carrillo struck the man with his baton 45 times in about 41 seconds, leaving the man with cuts on both legs and a broken bone in his foot. Carrillo, who was about 60 pounds heavier than the man, continued to beat him even after he was completely still.

Comments

[JeremyR]

When I was a young child, I wanted to be a cop so I could beat up hippies.

I grew out of it rather quickly, but clearly many police do not. And they don't just want to beat up hippies (which wrong is at least understandable)

[Chumby]

What if the hippie is also a ginger?

[Don't look at me!]

All bets are off.

[rbike]

I remember leaving my grandparents farm when I was about 7 years old and my father caught two Hippies hunting on the farm property. He stopped the truck, got out and yelled a long string of obscenities at these two long haired guys with shotguns. I remember thinking that I was going to be an orphan. Hippies had been rioting at the local college, highlighted on the local news so I had an irrational fear of hippies. This was the early 70's and the hippies peacefully left the farm and my dad made statements that if they had asked permission, it wouldn't have been a problem.

[gah87]

Can fear of hippies be irrational?

[Adans smith]

It should have been felony assault with at least 5 years.

[Fist of Etiquette]

No word on charges to his accomplice.

[Chumby]

Had you and another beat the stuffing out of the wife (or husband) of Mr. Carrillo, there would have been more charges and likely names immediately available. And felony convictions would have been easy as pie.

The government website releasing this info intimates authorities are still looking at the other LEO; however, given the poultry charges Carrillo received it seems perhaps that could be the extent of (criminal) charges. There is more at:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/former-veterans-affairs-police-officer-sentenced-1-year-federal-prison-beating-victim

[BadMan0321]

Those poultry charges are fowl.

[Fist of Etiquette]

"Restraint's not here, man."

[Don't look at me!]

Carrillo struck the man with his baton 45 times in about 41 seconds,

Dude is a machine.

[Chumby]

Guessing he was a top cellmate draft choice for how effectively he could toss off his fellow incarcerated criminals.

[gah87]

That's the standing LAPD record.

[AT]

Former Los Angeles police officer

VAPD. Not LAPD. There's an important distinction between the two.

Carrillo struck the man with his baton 45 times in about 41 seconds

Apparently we're going with the pipe-sucking stoner addict's version of events?

Unless... wait, do we have video of that? Because that's an awfully precise figure. And since this is a VAPD, that means the VAOIG was running this investigation. Which means federal oversight. Which likely means corruption and suppression (which tracks because, as an aside, the IG is an Obama-appointee).

I don't know. I'm guessing there's a whole lot more that Charles isn't telling us (and probably never bothered clicking past the first headline he found on the subject). Still, I guess it shouldn't be surprised that he's running with BigFed's bureaucracy narrative.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Why do you default to assuming the government police are right?

[AT]

Where did I do that, exactly?

I straight up said there's a lot we're missing from this story. I didn't side one way or the other. That's not assuming anything (except Charles' lame, constantly phoned-in, garbage lol JoUrNaLiSm).

[Stupid Government Tricks]

I re-read your comment, and you are right, I jumped to that conclusion, based partly on your comment history, which is my mistake.

[LIBtranslator]

ATF will make a good Nuremberg 2 defendant, providing he can afford 2 dozen lawyers to pettifog his every belch.

[BadMan0321]

Thankfully you are a FORMER police officer.

[AT]

Am I? Huh.

[Davy C]

He was working for VAPD at the time, but he's also a former LAPD officer. According to another source:

In seeking a one-year prison term for Carrillo, prosecutors noted that he was forced to resign from the Los Angeles Police Department after a 2004 incident in which he was accused of groping a woman, threatening to shoot another woman, and punching the second woman in the mouth.

So the wording was misleading in this context but technically true.

And according to yet another source, there is indeed a video, although it didn't provide it.

As for mitigating factors, the defense argued that the guy he beat was high on meth, it took 5 guys to subdue him, and a previous altercation with this very guy where officers were injured made them change the policy to use batons more often.

[LIBtranslator]

Senator Tydings of Maryland compiled an entire book documenting the unreported murders of citizens by God's Own Prohibition agents. It was only when the peopel fired back after economic collapse that prohibition was removed from the pedestal of qualified immunity.

[Vondy]

Well, that was excessive.

At the same time, there are some 800,000 police officers in the United States. We could see 100 headlines like this every single day, and it would still only represent .045% of police.

Our police culture is broken. Our police culture does need reform. There are bad police out there. The system protects those bad police far too often. That does need to change.

However, at the same time, there is a psychological distribution error at the heart of the way Reason constructs its narrative about police. The real story is far more complex.

[AT]

ACAB's gon ACAB. Not a lot of thought - or reason, or Reason, if you will - goes into it, Von.