Tuesday, August 27, 2019

This kid of crap is why so much of law enforcement

has lost trust:
...At a press conference Friday, Acevedo said Gerald Goines, the officer who instigated the raid by falsely claiming that a confidential informant had bought heroin from Tuttle at the house the day before, and Steven Bryant, who bolstered Goines' cover story, had "dishonored" their badges and the Houston Police Department (HPD). But Acevedo insisted that the other officers who participated in the raid had "acted in good faith" and killed the couple in self-defense.
"Just because it was a BS warrant, and the people thought criminals were breaking into their house, doesn't mean the officers didn't do a good job."
Seriously.

Acevedo, who initially defended the raid and described Goines as a hero, wants credit for investigating this fiasco. But he also wants us to believe that the fraud committed by Goines and Bryant, both of whom retired after the raid, does not implicate their colleagues in Narcotics Squad 15 or suggest broader problems in the HPD Narcotics Division. "I don't have any indication it's a pattern and practice," Acevedo said three weeks after the raid, by which time the Houston Chronicle and other local news outlets had noted Goines' history of alleged testilying and sloppy evidence handling.
I'm going to have to call bullshit.  I can't believe nobody else noticed anything(at the least) about the crap these clowns were pulling.  The Chief is trying to protect the reputation of the department with this noise, when it'd be much better served by "I'm going to find out who knew what, and anyone involved in this, including 'I knew it was going on but I never actually took part in the lying and evidence planting' is going to be fired."  But the chances of that are just about zero.

Ogg, by contrast, says her office is continuing to investigate the integrity of Squad 15 by reviewing more than 14,000 cases it has generated. "While today the focus is on Gerald Goines and Steven Bryant, there may be more to the story," she said on Friday. "The purpose of the broader investigation of Gerald Goines' past cases and of the squad's ties to these 14,000 different cases is…to determine if this was a single act by rogue officers or whether it's part of a greater and pre-existing problem in that squad or that division."
Good.  Because both those involved need to be nailed, and those not need to be cleared by an actual investigation.

So you've got a chief playing "Everyone else is fine, nothing to worry about" when what's really needed is a serious house cleaning.  Which is standard bureaucrat 'make the problem seem to go away, don't worry about actually fixing it'.  Yeah, that'll work out great in the long run.

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