Colorado officials reach $8.5 million settlement with woman who was left handcuffed in a police car that was hit by a train

Police are supposed to be civilians. The whole idea of America avoiding mitary dictatorship was vested in the Army being under the control of the Commander in Chief (a civilian chosen by civilians), In conjunction with the police force being comprised of civilians, otherwise that force is just a military with a different name. You can make the argument they're above civilians in current times but this is by no mean integral to american policing, and is in fact antithetical to the American idea of police.

Don't get me wrong I still think they're problematic even in the theoretical best case scenario, but they're definitely civilians. Know you enemy, know them well.

Or take settlement money out of police pension funds.

Police absolutely ARE CIVILIANS

So many people are anti-union but when it comes to the police union they're oddly silent...

Cops don't have qualified immunity in Colorado

30 months of probation?! That’s basically a slap on the wrist. That’s not accountability, that’s doing the absolute minimum to make it LOOK like “see, we’re accountable!”. Dude handcuffed a person in a car on railroad tracks.

Did you read the post you replied to? They said financially liable. Read through the quote you responded with and tell us where they are held financially liable. They are (rightfully) mad that it's the taxpayers that are effectively paying out the settlement instead of the police force.

The settlement amount will be split equally between the town and city and paid by their insurers, according to attorney Eric M. Ziporin, whose office represents the city.

Perhaps you should read it.

I guess that's technically accountability. Doesn't sound like much of a punishment.

And this is damn near a unicorn. (and likely would have been swept under the rug without cam footage - just like every other case where cops see justice) Just like one black president didn't signal the end of racism, a small percentage of cases where someone OTHER THAN taxpayers are on the hook for police misbehavior doesn't signal the end of a need for reform, it signals a nearly imperceptible change to the status quo. I'm grateful for the change, but it's barely a start.

Oh, no. They were just idiots in this case. If they want to really hurt you, they'll, just force an EMT to administer a lethal dose of ketamine, or break an old woman's arm over a petty theft from a walmart and then leave her wounded and untreated in jail for hours, or shoot an unarmed kid that called 911 because he was tripping on too many drugs and needed help. (All things that have happened in the area in the last few years.)

The cop who parked there isn't the cop who put the suspect in the car.

But one of the top things you might do if you were an immoral bully who was immune from criminal prosecution.

Does her capacity to assume nobody would be that stupid somehow preclude her from seeing that the car was on the train tracks?

Even in the dark, it's pretty noticeable when you're on even the paved part of train tracks that cross a road. I don't really understand how she couldn't have realized where the car was parked by sight or by feel while putting the suspect into the back seat.

Not sure why her level of assumption abojt whether cars would be on tracks would matter, if the tracks aren’t visually obscured or something.

One might assume there’d never be a volcano in Idaho, but when you toss a baby into the volcano you found in Idaho it doesn’t really matter what you would have assumed.