http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/12/18/1461493/-Former-Ferguson-area-cop-says-protests-have-literally-ruined-his-life?detail=email
I’ll be filing this one under “Boo Freaking Hoo.” As Daily Kos readers are aware, the August 2014 murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, touched off days of protests in the area. The response to those protests was heavily militarized and over-the-top. During one protest, St. Ann (Missouri) Police Lieutenant Ray Albers was seen walking with/through the crowd with his automatic rifle “raised and pointed” at protestors. He tells a group of media workers present in the crowd, “I will f------ kill you!” When the person recording him asks Albers his name, Albers’ reply is “Go f--- yourself.
Albers was suspended about a week or so after the video went viral and he eventually resigned from the police department. That should have been the end of it. Now, the Huffington Post reports Albers wants his job in policing back.
Albers resigned but was allowed to keep his license that allows him to be a police officer. On December 16, Missouri’s Administrative Hearing Commission met to decide if they would suspend or permanently revoke Albers license. That’s when the violins started playing: Albers says his life has been ruined since the Ferguson protests.
Wait … it gets worse. This is what Albers’s lawyer had to say:
“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 amazing how those who are of questionable character find it more the fault of the scenario they are in then their decision to be violent or radically bent toward aggressive behavior, like "if those Black people had not come out to protest a White cop's murdering of a young Black man than he never would have felt compelled to aggressively point a rifle or make threatening remarks at them".
the fact that they let him keep his credentials and let the murdering cop go free shows they never intended to see the situation any other way than in the favor of the police he knew they had his back both of them that emboldened them to commit their acts. in Ferguson Black lives don't matter
