Via Jonathan Adler, I see that one of the officers involved in Williams’ beating death has made a plea bargain, and offered testimony against her fellow officers. This is good news, and indicates that in this case at least, and at this late date, we’re moving toward some sort of justice.

I’d disagree rather forcefully with this commenter at the Volokh site, however:

So it turns out that although something terrible happened at the jail, there is no coverup going on, the video tape is in the hands of federal prosecutors, and the wheels of justice are in motion. As much as we’d like the video tape to be released the prosecutor does need time to do his job, and I have a fair amount of confidence that he’ll do it right.

Not that there is anything wrong with a little bit of public interest to keep a little bit of heat on. It would just help if the interested public took a little more time to find out the facts without assuming a coverup.

That’s not exactly how it happened. In fact, there was a long pattern of abuse at this particular jailhouse, including abuse reported by officers from other police departments, not just the suspects themselves. It took a suspect getting beat to death in custody for anything to be done about it. Even then, it took federal involvement, and nearly six months for a single officer to finally come around.

Sorry. But that’s nothing to celebrate. And it certainly doesn’t prove that Scalia was right about any sort of new accountability, transparency, or professionalism springing up in the nation’s police departments. If the victim had been a police officer, and the suspect a civilian, and the entire incident were captured on tape, we’d have had an arrest months ago.

There’s still a long way to go in this case. It’ll be interesting to see how the officers involved are charged.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 9:16 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Professionalism, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.