Asshole of the Week: Jack Johnson, Power Junkie Extraordinaire

TimK — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:56:38 -0800

Thanks to Radley Balko for a pointer to this comment by Prince George’s County Executive Jack Johnson regarding the Cheye Calvo case.

The Prince George police had raided Cheye Calvo’s home, looking for drugs. Turns out, I guess, he didn’t have anything to do with drugs after all. Oops.

(Yeah, I know. Even if you’re not familiar with the Calvo case, you’ve heard this story before. But bear with me, because it gets more interesting.)

Meanwhile, however, SWAT team members with itchy trigger fingers held him and his mother-in-law at gunpoint, after shooting his two dogs. No, that’s not quite right. Actually, the cops handcuffed them and interrogated them for hours, while his dogs were marinating nearby in pools of their own blood.

Scenarios of this type play out every week in the U.S. of A., home of the brave, land of the handcuffed and interrogated. What makes the Calvo case different is that Calvo is a politician: Mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland. And that means the police raid really was a mistake. Oops again.

Calvo demanded an apology. Instead of getting one, however, here’s the bullshit Jack Johnson pulled out of his ass:

I think in America that is the apology, when we’re cleared… Sometimes we realize that people are victimized… At the end of the day, the investigation showed he was not involved. And that’s, you know, a pat on the back for everybody involved…

So, leave to the side for now the fact that in many cases, the victimized person is not cleared—

No, scratch that. Don’t leave it to the side. Because that’s bullshit. Ask any competent defense lawyer: the cops have no interest in clearing you. Their mandate is to gather evidence to prove that you’re guilty, even if you’ve done nothing wrong. So if clearing the innocent is a pat on the back for the government, the government must not get very many pats on the back. If Calvo had not been connected, he could very well have been convicted by now.

Even so, it’s okay if people are victimized, as long as they don’t go on being victimized?

Hey, can I run my business that way? Sounds pretty fucking lucrative.

Oy vey! What an asshole!

-TimK

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Asshole of the Week: Jack Johnson, Power Junkie Extraordinaire