Today’s entry in the annals of rotten cop behavior is a two-fer. First, from Florida, a disturbing case of racist elder abuse, caught on dashcam (despite the cop’s efforts to switch the camera off):
Details from Raw Story:
Technicians in Florida have recovered dashcam video of a Melbourne police officer beating a 66-year-old man who suffers from dementia even though the officer deliberately tried to disable the recording.
An attorney for beating victim Albert Flowers told Florida Today that his client was prepared to sue the city of Melbourne.
“He should be fired,” attorney Paul Bross said of Officer Middendorf. “Anyone who’s being pulled over by this officer should be terrified.”
“It’s clear (Officer Middendorf) tried to destroy all the video in this case. He thought he had turned off the camera, and that’s why he acted the way he did.”
The video clearly shows Flowers calmly walking towards the police cruiser before Middendorf suddenly delivers a kick to his midsection. Before Flowers is able to get up, the white cop drops to his knees and pounds his fists into the African-American man’s face.
Flowers spent a month in the hospital after the encounter.
There is a good chance that the city of Melbourne will be paying for Mr. Flowers’ medical care, and I’d say they owe him. They’d also be fools not to fire that abusive cop.
Next, from Merry Old England, a far-from-merry tale of just how far cops will go to spy on, infiltrate and try to break up environmentalist groups. How about fathering out-of-wedlock children and then fucking off out of their lives, leaving not one but two or more bewildered victims in their wake?
Last month eight women who say they were duped into forming long-term intimate relationships of up to nine years with five undercover policemen started unprecedented legal action. They say they have suffered immense emotional trauma and pain over the relationships, which spanned the period from 1987 to 2010.
Until now it was not known that police had secretly fathered children while living undercover. One of them is [Bob] Lambert, who adopted a fake persona to infiltrate animal rights and environmental groups in the 1980s.
After he was unmasked in October, he admitted that as “Bob Robinson” he had conned an innocent woman into having an 18-month relationship with him, apparently so that he could convince activists he was a real person. She is one of the women taking the legal action against police chiefs.
Now the Guardian can reveal that in the mid-1980s, just a year into his deployment, Lambert fathered a boy with another woman, who was one of the activists he had been sent to spy on.
The son lived with his mother during the early years of his life as his parents’ relationship did not last long. During that time, Lambert was in regular contact with the infant, fitting visits to him around his clandestine duties.
After two years, the mother married another man and both of them took responsibility for raising the child. Lambert says the woman was keen that he give up his legal right to maintaining contact with his son and cut him out of her new life. He says the agreement was reached amicably and he has not seen or heard of the mother or their son since then.
Lambert did not tell her or the child that he was a police spy as he needed to conceal his real identity from the political activists he was spying on. The Guardian is not naming the woman or the child to protect their privacy.
Lambert was married during his secret mission, which continued until 1988.
Nice, eh? No word on what his wife thought of the whole affair, though. Probably something unprintable, if anyone has even thought to ask her at all…
And he’s not the only one who messed around on the job, ON ORDERS.
The second case involves an undercover policeman who was sent to spy on activists some years ago. He had a short-lived relationship with a political activist which produced a child.
He concealed his real identity from the activist and child as he was under strict orders to keep secret his undercover work from her and the other activists in the group he infiltrated. He then disappeared, apparently after his superiors ended his deployment. Afterwards, she remained under surveillance as she continued to be politically active, while he carried on with his police career.
The Guardian understands that as he had access to the official monitoring reports, he regularly read details of her life with a close interest. He watched as she grew older and brought up their child as a single parent, according to an individual who is aware of the details of the case.
The policeman has been “haunted” by the experience of having no contact with the child, whom he thought about regularly, according to the individual.
Sounds like this unnamed officer was himself a victim of the trap he was ordered to set. Just another occupational hazard, I suppose.
And let’s not forget the infamous Mark Kennedy case, either, in which activist women were basically defamed as sluts, and their entire organizations slammed, baselessly, for “promiscuity”. The fact that the police ordered their own officers to be promiscuous (supposedly, in order to blend in with those slutty, slutty hippies) is an irony that will, of course, go utterly unremarked. Right along with the less sexy, but more disturbing, irony that the police also ordered these same undercover officers to give false testimonies in court to further “protect” their fake identities. And, most disturbingly of all, if we look at Mark Kennedy in particular, is how emotionally ruinous it all turned out to be. At which point we have to ask: Is anything these people do real? And is all this fuckery actually worth it? Has it led to anything at all productive, like, you know, the arrest of an actual terrorist?
I have a pretty good guess as to what the answers will be. How about you?