When Senators and Police Go Bad

1
The inability of the police to report crimes because of political purposes is disturbing. The fact that Mayor Bloomberg would try to make himself and his city look better by underreporting on crime is a very disingenuous type of leadership: it indicates that people should lie and falsify claims in order to make the situation look better than it is. This is not how communities are transformed for the better, however. The police have a duty to serve and protect, and if the community feels it is not being served by them or is being underserved (because their issues are not being reported—such as shootings, assaults, attempted rapes and so on) then why is the community going to trust the police or its leadership? By urging the police to not report on so many crimes, the Mayor is undermining his own authority as well as that of the police department. It is evidence of a moral corruption within the authority structure and that corruption will trickle out in unwanted ways. This article is a reminder that it is always better to face facts and the reality of the situation than to try to mask that reality for political purposes or for personal reasons. People are not generally deceived by the facts on the ground and they can see with their own eyes what is happening—and that is bad for the relationship between the community and the police.

2
Any time police act like criminals, it is disturbing. Police have a duty to be not only good representatives of law and order, they also should set the bar for how people should behave. They should be exemplary citizens and show respect to all people, especially if they themselves want to be respected by the community. Stories like this just make one think that police officers want to be feared rather than respected. This officer clearly went beyond his mandate when he began to assault a citizen. That is why he is going to jail. And while I am sorry for his time that he will have to serve behind bars, it just shows that police need to have a better culture established for themselves. Officers who act like this are not well cultivated. Perhaps he was having a bad day, perhaps he was a bit off. Five years does seem like an excessive amount of time, so I wonder if there is not more to this case than meets the eye. Is the prosecutor trying to send a message to other officers? There is a lot of politics involved in these decisions that I feel should be left out as well. It is an unfortunate case all the way around.

3
This type of story is not one I like because the details are sketchy and it involves a lot of “he said, she said.” What really happened? Did the senator get involved in a fight that he did not start, as he said, or did he start a fight for some reason that is unclear in the article? One of the combatants had a history of violence already, so his side of the story is not going to have much credibility just by that fact alone. Was the senator set up for not following the party in a vote on same sex marriage? That could be another possibility. I’m not sure what the point of this article is other to cast doubt upon the senator’s credibility during an upcoming election. The media does play a large role in shaping public opinion and this type of piece could be a good example of what is happening here. However, it is impossible to make any kind of judgment on the facts based on this article alone. There are far too many details missing about what happened, which makes me think this article should have been fleshed out much more before being published.