I once knew a retired cop from Chicago. He admitted to me that he and his buddies would routinely pull over a black person if they saw him driving a nice car. And when I say “admitted” I mean as in he admitted to pulling his pants on every morning. It was just standard operating proceedure to him.

cops are a law unto themselves and have everyone scared shitless of them.

why didn’t the judge do the cops for perjury? Because they’re also scared shitless of them.

banana republic; thanks for the story

i find an ambivalent attitude to gay men and homophobic violence in my own case, which demonstrates another lack of attention to our rights. only when my partner was actually seriously assaulted near our home did they start to take our complaints about attacks seriously and “name” it as homophobic – i had to get a leading local politician and the garda gay liaison people to weigh in with the local constabulary. as one incident was being assessed by a group of gards, one asked us ‘wouldn’t we just move house’ (instead of having to police the area!) after the most recent two attacks on the house this week, caught on cctv footage, i was informed they were not sure if the footage would convince a judge – even tho’ 2 yobs wearing the same clothes as the perps, were apprehended just up the road. it’s just a messy situation that should not happen. i’m guessing that nothing on the long list of “incidents” has been investigated. while the donegal case is alarming from what i read, at least the case has been made more visible to public scrutiny of a sort.

Off the top of my head, I can think of.. at least four people who have been f-ed over, shall we say, by the police when they absolutely shouldn’t have been. (I’ve no reason to think that any of these people made things up, or exaggerated their stories.) Possible offences committed by the police against these people alone include assault, false imprisonment, false criminal charges, denial of contact with legal representative while in custody, giving false evidence in a court of law.

And, of course, what the police know is that, if someone is charged with a criminal offence, it is in the accused’s interests to plead guilty in the hope of getting lenient treatment from the judge; what a guilty plea means, however, is that – apart from accepting the crime of which they are accused – no evidence can be provided by the accused, so there is no opportunity for them to give their version of events. (A guilty plea could still result in a criminal conviction, of course.)

A not-guilty plea does allow the accused to give evidence; however the risk is, even if that evidence is accepted by the judge, that if the judge finds the accused guilty, the accused has demonstrated their lack of remorse for their crime by entering such a plea, and therefore risks a more severe penalty.

The Gardaí know exactly what they are doing, and with an ineffective Garda Commission to investigate complaints, that probably will never change.