The recording is disturbing. It shows the off-duty cops acting as aggressors while presumably under the influence. The aftermath — as was first reported by the Billings Gazette — exposes the officers’ belief they could get away with assaulting someone if they concocted a story about a shooting.
Bar Security Camera Exposes Off-Duty Officers’ Lies About Their Unprovoked Assault Of Another Bar Patron
from the shitcan-these-bozos-before-they-can-be-indemnified dept
That’s just the way it is.
That’s just the way it is.
"It shouldn’t be this way. Cops are given an incredible amount of power and expected to handle it responsibly. But when they start doing things they shouldn’t be doing, out come the lies. Accountability may as well be a foreign term of legal art because cops understand it about as well as they understand the laws they’re supposed to enforce: i.e., not at all.
When cops are allowed to deliver the narrative, it goes something like this:
An off-duty deputy was struck by a possible bullet fragment after an argument in front of a Billings bar turned violent early Saturday morning, and one person was hospitalized due to a rollover crash after fleeing the scene.
Billings Chief of Police Rich St. John provided what details were available about an altercation at the Grandstand Sports Bar and Casino during a press conference held Saturday afternoon. No arrests have been made, but at least one round from a handgun was possibly fired by a suspect. Both the deputy and a civilian who was involved are expected to fully recover, while the man pulled from the crash suffered life-threatening injuries.
That’s from the Billings (MT) Gazette’s original reporting about an altercation at a local bar. The police chief noted an investigation was ongoing and details were limited, but still provided enough details to make it appear the off-duty officer was a victim, rather than one of the perpetrators. . .
The Grandstand is a bar. The off-duty officers were drinking. They did not merely “meet,” a term that makes it appear the officers were fully in control of their mental and physical facilities when the so-called “altercation” took place. Also, it’s clear from this statement that the only story provided was delivered by the off-duty officers, considering the other person involved was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.
The real story arrived a few days later. CCTV footage from the bar provided a completely different — and an almost completely inarguable — depiction of the so-called altercation. The officers’ statements to Billings PD investigators were lies. The entire chain of events was set in motion by two off-duty officers (and one other person who has yet to be identified, but is suspected to be a recently retired officer) who decided they had the right and the power to apprehend and physically assault someone who offended them by driving through the parking lot while they stood in it, presumably intoxicated.
. . .
What’s on display here is these officers’ bullying behavior — something encouraged by the immense amount of power they’ve been given and the complete lack of accountability that often accompanies this power. It shows the officers felt they could not only assault a “civilian” with impunity but that they could get away with it — a not totally unreasonable assumption given how most law enforcement agencies minimize, if not completely ignore, officer misconduct.
These officers had no idea a camera captured the whole incident. That’s why they felt comfortable lying to the 25 officers who rushed to the scene of the nonexistent shooting of an off-duty officer. Now they’re going to be facing an internal investigation and a civil rights lawsuit from Louis Delgado without the ability to lie about what actually happened that night. Hopefully they’ll be out of a job long before Delgado’s lawsuit has run its course, making it almost impossible for them to ask taxpayers to foot the bill for their wrongdoing.
Filed Under: billings, billings pd, louis delgado, matt frank, montana, police, police brutality
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