11/10/11
At the Modesto Police Department, officers are regularly trained and taught to yell: Stop Resisting, Stop Resisting so that citizens may think that the bad guy is in fact resisting. It often begins with a citizen questioning why the officer is doing this or that. It always ends up with officers calling for more officers to beat up and eventually book these suspects into jail.
This is a common practice at the MPD and Chief Harden and 100% of patrol officers know it. Pull the radio tapes and you will hear it. Talk to suspects and you will see their injuries.
Lift up their shirts and you will see their bruises from officer's knees, police boots and baton marks.When these officers to go court, they jokingly tell each other that they are going to "testa-lie" . Yes, some of them brag that they get to lie on the stand. And, yes, many get away with it. When they get a subpoena to show up for court - they get paid lots of overtime money to: just hang out and watch their pockets get full. Cases get continued and they keep getting paid.
It's a vicious circle. Some officers become "drug-experts" and get to live in court during the day, and work at night. Their paychecks often exceed $170,000 per year. I
f you look back far enough, in one year, one of these officers made more money than the city of modesto police chief.
Keep in mind that only judges can impose sentences on individuals. Once cops cross the line from enforcing the law to administering punishments, they are in fact criminals and should be held to the same standards as any other citizen who commits any crime.
If some of you in this forum are cops and are endorsing these "beatings" and "trying to justify that they should in fact happen... then.... you are in fact an accessory to a federal crime.It is time that we as Modesto citizens say: "Enough is enough."
What happened twenty years ago will no longer be tolerated today. Street justice is not a training procedure that is endorsed by any of the police academies in our state. On the contrary, police recruits are taught that if they violate citizen's rights while in uniform, they can be charged with violation of U.S. Govt. Code sections 241 and 242- Under color of authority. These are federal violations that should be investigated by the F.B.I. not by some joe-shmoe agency or organization.
Once the FBI moves in, officers who lie to them can actually be prosecuted for this alone. Lie to the FBI and find a one-way ticket to federal prison. Let us not allow Harden or any of cronies in the Ivory Tower at MPD to convince city officials to allow a private organization or - worse yet, the Sheriff's department to conduct this investigation.
We hope that the good cops at Modesto PD will prevail and that the bad cops will be escorted out with a court date to show up and answer to their criminal charges. If Harden and the city manager are found to have been told about these matters and not done anything about it, then they should also be escorted out of their public held positions. You can't simply look the other way and not except to get caught in the web.
The Good officers at the Modesto PD are in fact reading these postings and wondering if the investigation will in fact do any good. Hopefully, these matters will be investigated by a federal in a fair and impartial way.
Officers who have witnessed these incidents should be allowed to become whistleblowers without backlash from department administrators.There is already talk within the department about who wrote the second letter and that the department will find out and go after them.
Sadly, the focus should be on locating, identifying, and prosecuting these rogue cops who have been violating the law. Plante was merely a messenger of truth and he too can be protected under the whistleblower act.
