once upon a time, a police officer refused a direct order from his sergeant to arrest a homeless man, and for that he was punished. of course, the punishment could’ve been worse. he literally put his job on the line because he wouldn’t arrest a homeless man in new york.
In a written decision finding Delacruz guilty, a department judge found that “by deciding which orders he would obey, the (officer) is treading on a slippery slope that would undermine the leadership and viability of the department, if unchecked.”
and this leaves us with the question… is following a questionable order what we expect of our law enforcement personnel, or do we demand the standard we have held others to: “i was just following orders” is no excuse.
it’s an old story, from 2002 – i picked up on it in october from the ap wire when the decision to suspend delacruz brought it back to life, but i did find some more contemporary material
so, a nod from me to eduardo delacruz. thanks for stepping up.
update: this just in from the new york post gazette. i guess i’m not the only one to revisit this story this week.
posted by roj at 3:26 am
the problem to explore for now is that we have sex offenders and other difficult people living among us, and the government provides a “target list” for some of them. mix in a little “my morality is better than your morality” and eventually, someone’s going to come along and justify some questionable behavior.
it’s not a new thing – we’ve had people try to justify killing doctors that perform abortions, and human society has a long history of banishing people that make trouble in one form or another.
in the category of “this had to happen sooner or later,” under law of unintended consquences, the tough-on-crime fear-panering legislatures that gave us sex-offender registries will have a good time with this one:
“I don’t want people to steal the souls of little kids,” Trant, 57, said in an interview in prison last week. “I’m doing 30 years for something I think is morally justified.”
i guess part of the problem might be that we don’t have anywhere to banish these people anymore. if we kick them out of our village, they just end up in someone else’s village. we can’t ship them off to leper colonies or australia, so we’re going to have to find some way to live with them.
any suggestions?
posted by roj at 2:50 am
from the “you can’t be serious” department here at the rojisan empire, comes the ycc (your concept car) news item from sky.com:
For those with short skirts, there are gull-wing doors to help preserve modesty.
my first thought was… huh?
my second thought was… i bet a bunch of women designers got together and decided that they wanted cool doors on their concept car, and when someone asked about it, they came up with some bogus story about short skirts as an explanation/inside joke. i mean, it’s not like volvo management is going to try wearing short skirts and see how it works with the gullwing doors (or will they? i mean, they are swedish, right?)… anyway. i think
then, i considered the source… so i decided to see if there was an alternative explanation available…
“We chose a gull-wing door with a modest wingspan to help us showcase the YCC’s interior solutions,” says Elna Holmberg, Technical Project Manager. “And it brought other advantages – it makes it easy to lift a bag in behind the driver’s seat and it increases your visibility over your shoulder to the side because the B-pillar has been moved towards the rear. And when the door opens upwards, the dropdown door sill rotates simultaneously, so getting in and out is so much easier.”
yeah, ok. so sky.com is full of crap. no surprise there.
i still think the designers wanted cool doors.
more on the ycc from volvo is available here.
posted by roj at 2:41 am
radiation. and lived to 102.
posted by roj at 7:05 am
in a curiously-timed follow-up to the guilty plea for jamming phones with robotic dialers in an attempt to influence the outcome of an election, james tobin, northeast political director for the republican senatorial committee has been indicted for conspiracy to commit telephone harassment.
The 2002 phone jamming consisted of computer-generated calls to get-out-the-vote phones run by state Democrats and the nonpartisan Manchester firefighters’ union. More than 800 hang-up calls tied up phones for about 90 minutes.
posted by roj at 5:26 am