Something tells me officer Terigi Rossi of the Dallas PD, and a former “star” of the reality TV show, Dallas SWAT, has a vocabulary problem. Either that, or he has serious anger management/emotional/steroid abuse issues. Because this isn’t the kind of behavior that I would call an attempt to console anyone:
In profanity-laden terms, Rossi is seen on video telling the teen what’s going to happen if he doesn’t shut up.
“I’ll break your f***ing neck,” he says in the recording, which News 8 obtained through an open records request. “You understand me? You understand me?” […]
Rossi told internal investigators that he put his arm around the boy to console him.
In his statement to internal investigators, Rossi said he was using “verbal judo” to try to get information from the teen. He said that telling him he would break his neck was a “verbal technique that I’ve used to try to calm down people or suspects in my career with no intention of ever meaning the words I say.”
Rossi had responded to a 911 call, and decided to arrest the teenager’s stepmother. She was in handcuffs and the boy followed the officer outside, when Officer Rossie got into this verbal confrontation with the young man because – well because he wasn’t being respectful enough. Though according to the phone recording (which you can see and hear at WFAA) I have a hard time comprehending what the young man did to incite such a violent and threatening response from Rossi. Well, other than he was at the scene, I suppose, and didn’t give Rossi enough information to justify an arrest of the stepmother that Rossi demanded of him.
The video shows the officers escorting the woman to the squad car. The teen follows. Rossi then turns his attention to the teen, asking if she is his mother. The teen initially says “yes,” but then explains that his real mother is work. It turns out she was his stepmother.
Throughout the video, the teen speaks in a matter-of-fact tone, never using profanity with the officer.
Rossi threatens to take the teen downtown to speak to a detective if he doesn’t talk with him.
Although the youth’s phone recording and the statement by Rossi’s own partner’s conflicted on almost every significant detail with Rossi’s own report of the “incident,” one in which no one ultimately was arrested, Officer Rossi is back on the job. “He knows he made a mistake,” according to his police union’s president. I wonder how many other mistakes are made by our “protectors of public safety” that are never acknowledged because, hey, no evidence exists to dispute the police officer’s statement of what went down.
Nah, Just kidding. I don’t really wonder at all.
