I’m a little confused by the legal strategy of police Lt. Ray Albers. I thought that the proper thing when you point a rifle at protestors, tell them to fuck themselves, and threaten to shoot and kill them, was that your life is subsequently ruined. At a minimum, you should lose your job, but you’ve just issued terroristic threats. It seems like you should probably go to prison.
Of course, a law enforcement officer who is engaged in crowd control has a little more leeway than a private citizen, and he can certainly argue that there were mitigating factors, like he’s a giant coward, that led him to use poor judgment. Maybe he could avoid serving time with the people who couldn’t pay for his speed trap fines.
However, me personally?
Any inclination I might have toward leniency and forgiveness pretty much went out the door when Lt. Albers’ attorney starting whining about how his client’s life has been ruined.
On Wednesday, Albers was at an administrative hearing as the Missouri Department of Public Safety tried to convince a member of the state’s Administrative Hearing Commission to take disciplinary action by suspending or permanently revoking the license that allows him to work as an officer.
The state of Missouri says Albers acted “without legal justification” when he pointed his assault rifle at a crowd of people, and that his “threat to commit a felony” — specifically, murder — violated Missouri law…
…Albers and his lawyer, Brandi Barth, offered several different defenses for his actions that night. Barth argued it was “unfair” to make Albers “the poster child” for bad policing during the Ferguson protests, and showed off photos of a number of other officers pointing rifles at protesters. Indeed, St. Louis County officers stationed on top of armored vehicles even pointed their sniper rifles at crowds of peaceful protesters in broad daylight a few days after Brown’s death, a tactic that drew widespread condemnation.
“There’s selective enforcement against Mr. Albers, in a situation where we have now seen at least a dozen officers in the selected photos having their rifles raised,” Barth said. “This situation of 30 seconds in a 20-year career has literally ruined his life.”
It’s not that I dispute that his life has been ruined, but he’s still alive.
Seems like things are about exactly as they should be.
Yes his life might be ruined,
however instead of crying about it in public,
he should go home
look into a mirror and
cuss out the SOB who ruined it for him ….
cause he has no one but himself to blame for his own illegal actions
He was solely responsible for his action. So he should face it bravely as he did when his doing that action.
So his life has been “ruined”?
All I can say that he and we should probably hold off on that determination until we see the results of the administrative hearing. Since it seems, largely, to have become accepted and permitted practice to ACTUALLY KILL unarmed people who are no threat, the likelihood that he will be given a pass to continue as a law enforcement officer somewhere is probably pretty high, because, hey, he only threatened to kill them. After all, one need look no further than Officer Tim Loehman in Cleveland for evidence that competence under pressure is often a trait which is only selectively required in some police departments.
I can easily visualize Mr. Albers walking around again very soon with a badge on his chest and the mental justification still in his head that it’s perfectly fine to stick a weapon in the face of an unarmed black person and tell them “get out of my fucking face” or “I will fucking kill you”. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of behavior that many people among us want to see MORE of.
All we seem to get from cops, and their bosses, is contempt.
I come from a family of cops. My father worked for law enforcement until age 79; his father was a career beat cop. That’s exactly why officers like this dude make me sick to my stomach.
If you’ve drawn your service weapon – let alone pointing it and threatening to shoot – in almost all circumstances you’ve already failed. Something like this, armed with a long gun and hundreds of colleagues in the immediate aftermath of a lethal force incident, is not only bullying cowardice; it’s also really bad policing. And it says everything that needs to be said about this dude’s attitude toward the people he allegedly serves – an attitude that these days permeates way too many departments. It’s usually a cultural rot, top to bottom, that allows cops like this to fester, er, have a 20-year career.
As for his timeline – most first degree murders are committed in mere seconds. Does Officer Albers always show the same deference to their perpetrators, or does it depend on whom they’ve killed?
“There’s selective enforcement against Mr. Albers, in a situation where we have now seen at least a dozen officers in the selected photos having their rifles raised,” Barth said.
Go after ’em all, then.
Just like the recent trial in Baltimore over Freddie Gray’s death: dep’t policy says ‘seatbelt the prisoner’, but EVERYONE violates the policy, so … it’s okay?
Does that mean I can get a speeding ticket dismissed because “everyone does it”? No?
Oh yeah, one law for the ‘Warrior Cops’, a different (harsher) law for the ‘Peons’. So glad we’re living in a modern society.
He remains alive, and unpunished for his crimes so far, so I assume he’s still got a roof over his head, a shirt on his back, and food to eat every day. Have any other avenues for advancement been closed to him? Has he lost the right to travel, retrain, seek other employment doing anything he’s better qualified to do?
Men that are “ruined” when they are under threat of losing a livelihood based on providing protective services for the state are exactly the kind of people that shouldn’t be in that line of work. Way too many cops, tens of thousands added in the 90s and early 2000s to corps that were already too large. The jobs are way too easy to get and sought by way too many. No man should want such a job; he should take it on reluctantly out of a humble sense of duty because he has the moral integrity, courage, advanced skills, and physical fitness, not because there’s a job opening and he’s too stupid to know he’s unqualified for it. (And always men, not women, losing their shit in these situations.)
The current police state and all its consequences, including the ruination of this sick man, goes back to the source of the problem: too many police in our cities with no way to effectively control them any more.
No, things are not as they should be, not even close. Since that attorney showed, in court, other officers pointing their weapons in the same way, all those officers should also be tried in the same way. I would go further to say that the supervisors of all these officers involved at the very least need to be reduced in rank and never be allowed to supervise again, anywhere. If there was ever a place that needs to be cleaned out, this is it.
There are states and cities where out of control police make it unwise to live or ever travel through except by air because of out of control police, I think mostly because of poor leadership. I include Austin, TX in this list. Gun nuts roaming around are not as dangerous as out of control police because the police can and almost always do get away with it, it’s why this kind of person became police in the first place. We cannot call ourselves a civilized society with out of control police. Period.
“The other guys did it and didn’t get caught” — wow, that’s some mighty fine lawyerin’.
If your cases are all culled from the nearest playground.
I’m sure that will sing on my next speeding ticket.
It should be pointed out that the problem is not solely, nor even mainly, that he pointed his weapon at unarmed protestors but that, unlike the other officers who did likewise, he threatened to kill said protestors without cause.
I would hope that those pushing for him to be refused the ability to be a law enforcement officer in the future pointed out that critical difference.
No, Michael Brown’s life was ruined. Ray Albers still has his.