The Horne case with Buffalo PD

Sorry to keep harping on this, but there's a lot of material out there. I guess this was going on all the time, but it's only reaching our eyeballs now due to the media attention and high-profile cases.

https://news.vice.com/article/buffalo-cop-loses-job-and-pension-after-she-intervenes-with-fellow-officer-choking-a-suspect?utm_source=vicenewsfb

I think this episode summarizes what is wrong with police accountability (or lack thereof). According to this Vice report, Cariol Horne, a female black officer with the Buffalo PD (19 years tenure) saw another white male officer striking and choking a suspect who was already in handcuffs. She told him to stop, and may have put her hands on the other officer. The other officer punched her in the face in the presence of 9 other officers. Sounds open and shut, right? She was charged with obstructing an arrest, was fired, and got her pension annulled. Meanwhile, the alleged abusive officer was unpunished.

He later was implicated in 2 violent incidents with other officers (which led to his "forced retirement"), and was recently indicted for past civil rights violations relation to treatment of black youths. Horne is still trying to recover her pension.

So let me get this straight, a violence-prone racist cop gets no discipline and full pension from his department, but the "whistleblower" cop who tried to look out for the rights of a suspect gets fired with no pension? Cops and crooks both seem to espouse the philosophy that "snitches get stitches." Some PDs seem more interested to root out disloyalty/threats rather than actual misconduct. It's a cop's "duty" to look out for each other and cover up crimes if necessary. If they don't, and if they dare go against the blue line, then their career is finished. For the benefit of doubt, there could be more to this story. But still, Horne must not have been that bad if she was on the job for 19 years. As a black female cop, she had a much smaller margin for error on the job. So I don't think this is a case of her just crying wolf.

Obviously, this is not how a public agency (or any org) should function.