Cleveland officer Timothy Loehmann, who shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice on November 22, 2014, was also fired on May 30, 2017.
NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, who killed Eric Garner over not paying taxes on cigarettes, was not fired until August 19, 2019, a full five years after the latter's death on July 17, 2014.
What I would like to emphasize here is that a police officer being fired is often not the end of the story.
Each of these men, who were all Pittsburgh Police officers at the time of the incidents, shares a common experience: They all were fired, charged criminally, cleared of those chargesand then got their jobs back through arbitration.
In cases where terminations were appealed by the police union through arbitration, officers got their jobs back close to 70 percent of the time.
Although most states have some kind of standardized training and licensing of police officers, decertification of fired officers can be notoriously difficult, leading to the phenomenon of the "Wandering officer" who goes from department to department.
No comments:
Post a Comment