The Kansas City Police Force is one of the worst gangs of thugs in the city. Maybe the worst. They are so miserable and corrupt that the city does not control them - the state legislature does. There are bad actors on every police force, assholes and feckless bullies who hide behind their badges and terrorize the citizens. The kind of jackasses who tazer a 68 year old grandma because she honked her horn at them as she was trying to park in her driveway.
Don't get me wrong - I've been in the ER and had a patient on meth or PCP lose it and been damned glad for the security and police presence. I have worked closely with cops my entire career. The orbits of law enforcement and emergency medical response often intersect and overlap. I have known and trusted police officers personally and professionally for over two decades. Then I moved here, and the years I spent on an inner-city trauma team in this town brought me closer to these jackasses than I ever wanted to be. The KCPD is the only time I not only didn't have faith in the police I worked with, I actively distrusted them, with empirical evidence to back up my opinion. I do not miss not working with them. I prefer to trust the guys and gals I work with who carry the firepower. I prefer they not be sociopaths. I don't think those standards are too high. The ones I crossed paths with that didn't make my neck-hairs stand on end, I can count on my fingers. Sometimes I smelled brimstone.
Here, in this town, the bad cops may not outnumber the good ones, but they are representative of a large enough percentage that they undermine the good ones and the good ones just can't make any headway with the public. So they give up and if they don't become bad cops, they at least become indifferent cops.
Dead babies don't help their public image any.
If you don't live here, chances are you don't know about Sophia Salva. A year ago, two police officers pulled over a Somali immigrant for having an illegal tag on her car. Video from the camera mounted in the police car show, Ms. Salva asked for help more than 20 times in the first minutes of the stop, telling the arresting officers that she was pregnant and bleeding. Her pleas were actively ignored. A female officer can be heard snapping at her that "It's called a menstrual cycle" in a tone just dripping with hatred. One of the officers can also be heard asking her "How's that my problem?"
She was denied the medical attention she requested, taken to jail instead of the hospital, detained over night, and she miscarried the next morning.
Well, it's their problem now. The public is pissed. It has been officially recommended that the officers be fired, and the police board should follow that recommendation. Right now, even pro-choice me is sort-of wishing we had a fetus-protection law in Missouri that we could use to jail these useless, bullying cops.
Firing does not punish them enough. They need to face criminal charges, AND stiff civil penalties. They need to be bared from police work and security work and any line of work where they wold have any measure of authority over the general public, because they obviously can't be trusted with it.
I am really tired of the state of the police department in this town. Seven decades ago the state lege took over because the cops were so corrupt and craven. Still they are under state control because they just can't get their act together.
And you know what? The good cops are damned near as complicit as the bad ones because they don't do anything about it. They keep the silence and they look the other way. Until they stand up and say enough, they are just as feckless as the bad ones.
