Louisville Police Officer Cody Chapelle has been suspended for 13 days after he gave a ticket to a seven-year-old boy who accidentally threw a ball that hit his personal vehicle. He charged the child with criminal mischief in the third degree.
The boy was playing ball when he turned criminal with an overthrow.
To complete this bizarre scene, Chapelle reported yelled at the boy’s mother about being a bad parent. Police Chief Robert White, however, felt it was more a matter of being a bad cop than a bad kid.
Here is the Kentucky criminal code provision:
512.040 Criminal mischief in the third degree.
(1)
(2)
A person is guilty of criminal mischief in the third degree when:
(a) Having no right to do so or any reasonable ground to believe that he has such right, he intentionally or wantonly defaces, destroys or damages any property; or
(b) He tampers with property so as knowingly to endanger the person or property of another.
Criminal mischief in the third degree is a Class B misdemeanor.
Source: WHAS
Jonathan Turley
It’s scary to think there are police officers out there like this. Clearly he didn’t understand the statute he was applying. The 7 year old action was accidental and not intentional. It’s the kind of officer I fear running into. Because every year, thousands of Americans are killed by police officers, at dozens possibly hundreds were not justified killings and when this happens their com-padres on the force most of the time turn into a Mafia and protect them with falsifications.
In medical circles it’s considered unethical for a doctor to treat himself, or his family members. The close personal relationship means that the doctor’s professional objectivity is potentially compromised.
I think cops should be adopting this standard too. If it was a random person who had a ball thrown at his car, then they’d call the cops. He should call the cops too, and let them decide if there has been a crime.
Gyges:
RE: talking “behind your back”
No problem. 🙂
With unbridled respect to all who comment here, I observe a common attribution error across the whole spectrum of people who here comment, it has been named “the fundamental attribution error,” and is well described in every recent social psychology book I have read.
The fundamental attribution error assigns to a person responsibility for situational factors and effects actually outside a person’s locus of control.
In December of 1995, my wife’s and my adopted son, Michael, said to me, and this is as close to verbatim as my memory permits, “If anything happens to me and Shelly, I want you to do everything in your power to keep my son, Shawn, out of the hands of Shelly’s mother, the fucking damn bitch, she’s evil.”
Please note that what Michael said to me is in the public record, when my wife and I were being financially destroyed by Shelly’s mother, Laurie Dukes, and by Laurie’s attorneys, I never retaliated against Laurie, I never counter-sued, and I never thought she ought to do other than as she did–because I fully understood that neither Laurie Dukes nor her attorneys (one of whom was James Ebbeson) had any way to understand or do better than they understood or were doing. I find no fault with people who find fault with me.
To Michael, I said, “I don’t think she’s evil, I don’t think anyone is, yet I think there are people to whose hurts we are all blind.
Given my understanding of what Jared Loughner put on YouTube, which I experience as the essentially most intensely passionate poetry I have ever read, poetry of a person undergoing catastrophic failure of the defense mechanism of focal catatonic stupor, I find no one can ever be evil.
What can be evil is beliefs in the form of deceptive constructs which deceive people into believing that said deceptive constructs are not deceptive. That is evil, as I encounter it.
In that sense, the adversarial system of law and justice is as evil as anything I have ever experienced, yet the people who believe in the adversarial system are inescapably as innocent as an unborn fetus.
Those persons who seek to not be deemed evil wisely deem no other person to be evil. Constructs cannot think. People can and do. Constructs do not think because they cannot think, so evil construct cannot think their way out of being evil. People can think their way out of thinking that any person can ever be evil.
There is a tradition in which the great deceiver is evil and in which evil is the great deceiver.
Is greater deception possible than believing that a hurt person is evil instead of hurting?
There are no evil people. To believe otherwise is evil itself. To believe that a person is evil may be the greatest of all possible forms of evil.
I have never met an evil person. I have met many people who have been terribly hurt and remain dreadfully hurting. I have met people who could find no words to convey their hurts or their needs, and who, in the total failure of words spoken being accepted by others, finally acted out their no-longer-bearable pain.
Jimmy Durante, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, on June 29, 1953, finally became broken by society beyond his power to withstand, Grace and Sumner Harris died horrid deaths.
No greater evil have I ever known than to label someone as evil. For not being willing to hurt anyone, I have been labeled evil, a label I reject as I forgive those who so labeled me.
Yet I find no fault with those who label others evil, for such is also totally situational and never the labeling person’s fault.
I thought I’d come up with an new appellation – Snark Tart. But, sure enough, someone is there before me.
http://www.snarktart.com/
Don’t bother. It’s incredibly inane. Do I have to draw you a diagram?
frank:
Actually, I was responding to various complaints that I don’t have what it takes to take on all comers. And then there are comments that I’m a robot. I guess I’m a cowardly robot.
My comments were in RESPONSE to those comments about me. Since no one seemed to be able to figure out why I might not be able to respond (and they brought this up first, not me), I felt compelled to tell the kiddies why Mommy is so busy.
sheesh…..
Do I have to draw you a diagram as well?
Do you think you can get along without me while I go clean the kitchen? Do I have your permission? Can I go now?
Tootie, one of your least endearing qualities is your pity-party posts when you are called out on a rant. Last time was “I work for a living and am so tired”. This time is a Chinese menu, chose one from column A & two from Column B.
I work for a living too. I get paid by the hour with no holiday, vacation or sick days – whaaaa.