Two former West Palm Beach police officers have been arrested in the beating a handcuffed robbery suspect, Pablo Valenzuela, 43, as captured on this dash cam video from May 2008. Louis Joseph Schwartz, 30, and Kurt John Graham, 24, were fired last August and are now facing felony conspiracy to commit official misconduct and misdemeanor battery.
Pablo Valenzuela had tried to rob a CVS pharmacy when he was captured in the parking lot.
Schwartz and Graham are accused of falsifying police reports after the arrest but claiming that Valenzuela tried to bite Graham’s leg.
The arrest followed the sentencing of a Chicago police officer for beating a handcuffed, wheelchair bound knife victim, here. For other cases of alleged excessive force by police officers captured on video, click here and here and here and here and here and here and here.
For the full story, click here.
Sounds good to me. Can they be detained in Cuba awaiting trial? Maybe they could take a bath using a waterboard.
I am pleased to see corrupt LEOs brought to justice.
Well FF LEO, is it as hot out west as it is in Texas?
Anonymously Yours,
I would be rude by not replying to you with a brief explanation. You and I can both continue to contribute to this blawg without interacting directly with each other and that is what I choose to do.
I am not condemning nor judging you because I have no standing whatsoever to do so. However, please leave me out of your discussions and replies, as I will do with yours.
Good luck with your legal practice.
Thank you.
The eye of Big Brother is upon them, still they cannot resist the pleasure of violently taking advantage of weaker people.
Gives new meaning to the bully pulpit doesn’t it?
It is a definite meme which belongs to Straussian neoCons.
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2009/06/coup-in-military-molded-neocon-dogma.html
FF LEO,
Nuff said. Good luck in your pursuit.
Dredd, Your statement begs the question ‘why?’. When I worked as a labor advocate I would run into situations that were out of control from top to bottom regarding management. I dubbed it ‘CwC’, Comfortable w/Corruption and would use terms like ‘that Department has a high CC index’.
What that meant was that the whole chain of command was so corrupt ie: peers covering for peers, management backing their story, upper level management that knew what was really going on backing their lower level management, that (moral) corruption was institutionalized and people were so comfortable with it that they assumed they were invincible.
That IMO is exactly what we have going on with cops doing what they do even though they know that there are cameras. Even if they’re caught, so what? They won’t be prosecuted and if they are they won’t be convicted because the prosecutors’ office, judges and jury’s are in on the corruption.
Who can even imagine how often this kind of thing goes on or how high the level of violence is for police to feel so comfortable that they don’t care that there are cameras? Maybe ask the Bart shooting victim in SanFran? Oh, wait, can’t do that.
My supply of outrage has long ago been exhausted, i think soon after I made the mistake of Googling “Amadou Diallo NYPD shot”.
For every one of these cases where there is video evidence against the police there are 1000 or more where it is absent.
The above video simply shows normal operating procedure.