Police in Galveston, Texas are being sued for allegedly arresting a 12-year-old Dymond Larae Milburn outside of her home as a prostitute in 2006. The girl did not realize that the plainclothes officers were police and fought back as she screamed for her father inside the house. She was reportedly beaten by the officers and ended up with sprained wrist, two black eyes, a bloody nose, and blood in an ear. Weeks later, the police arrested her for resisting arrest.
Sgt. Gilbert Gomez and Officers David Roark and Sean Stewart have insisted that their conduct was entirely appropriate.
The police were responding to a report of three white prostitutes working in the area, but some how ended up arrested and roughing up a 12-year-old black girl in front of her house.
The honor student was then arrested at her middle school on a charge of resisting arrest — but a mistrial prevented further prosecution.
For a copy of the complaint, click here.
For the full story, click here.
Need further proof the Galveston PD is inept? Ask the people who sat in two-hour long traffic on the causeway hours after accidents happened. There is no reason to make people sit in bumper to bumper traffic while the Galveston police sit in their vehicles doing nothing. Drivers in Houston would have just run over them. Thank God we don’t have as inept a P.D. as Galveston.
I have lived in Galveston for the past two years. I stayed on the island during the hurricane. In my few encounters with and observations of the Galveston police, my opinion of them is that they are generally speaking a bunch of ill-trained, unprofessional, immature hard-asses lording it over the citizenry.
I do not say this as someone who is anti-police in general, as my own son was a police officer for several years in another state, and I tend to give the profesion a good deal of the benefit of the doubt.
Law enforcement staff from all over the country came to Galveston after Hurricane Ike, and I have nothing but gratitude and praise for them. I thank them from the bottom of my heart for their kindness and service. But the Galveston police, whose opportunity it was to shine – or at least bolster their sorry reputation – were a disgrace. A young officer from the Dallas area told me that he’d heard the Galveston police force is young and therefore perhaps too inexperienced to handle the emergency situation well. Inexperience I can excuse. Bad-ass, hair-trigger, incompetent punks with attitude, however, simply don’t belong in law enforcement.
How I would love to sit on that jury. I woudn’t care if the trial lasted six months.
If so consider me Lex Luthor.
“The vigilante perimenopausal female warriors?”
LindyLou, I don’t see why that can’t be a new superhero league!
Police use excessive force, ER docs say
Wed Dec 24, 11:22 am ET
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – In a survey of a random sample of U.S. emergency physicians, virtually all said they believed that law enforcement officers use excessive force to arrest and detain suspects.
The sample included 315 respondents. While 99.8 percent believed excessive force is used, almost as many (97.8 percent) reported that they had managed cases that they suspected or that the patient stated had involved excessive use of force by law enforcement officers.
Nearly two thirds (65.3 percent) estimated that they had treated two or more cases of suspected excessive use of force per year among their patients, according to a report of the survey published in the January 2009 issue of the Emergency Medicine Journal.
Dr. Jared Strote of the University of Washington, Seattle, and a multicenter team also found that emergency physicians at public teaching hospitals were roughly four times more likely to report managing cases of suspected use of excessive force than those at university or community teaching emergency departments.
Blunt trauma inflicted by fists or feet was the most common type of injury cited in cases of suspected use of excessive force, followed by “overly tight” handcuffs.
Most emergency physicians (71.2 percent) admitted that they did not report cases of suspected use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.
A large majority (96.5 percent) reported that they had no departmental policies on reporting their suspicions or they did not know of a policy to guide their actions, and 93.7 percent said they had received no education or training in dealing with these situations.
However, most emergency physicians (69.5 percent) felt that it was within their scope of practice to refer cases of suspected use of excessive force for investigation and almost half (47.9 percent) felt that emergency physicians should be legally required to report cases of suspected use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.
These findings, Strote and colleagues conclude, “suggest that national emergency medicine organizations in the USA should become involved, jointly developing and advocating for guidelines to manage this complex issue.”
LindyLou 1, December 24, 2008 at 9:38 pm
“Waynbro,
Who’s going to arrest them? If the police chief is corrupt, and so are the commissioners and the mayor, who’s going to arrest the police–the vigilante perimenopausal female warriors?”
Hmmm, that sounds too pleasurable.
But you’ve put your finger on the crux of the problem.