(Part Two of the Cops Being Douchebags series)
So, I'm thinking maybe it's time Miami cops start answering for all the ass-hattery they've been perpetrating as of late.
We've all seen this video from the window of a Miami Beach hotel room.
Your first (ok, actually my first) thought is "whoa that’s pretty cool, a shootout". But then you start to notice a few pretty scary details, like how it wasn't much of a shootout, as all the cops lined up in front of the car. and they all opened fire like they were executing the driver. Mind you, “Like they were executing” is a huge difference from actually “executing”. Or maybe how there’s no evidence on the video that shows the driver, Raymond Herisse, doing anything particularly deserving of getting shot a whole bunch of times.
Then more and more details start emerging, especially what this guy had done to deserve getting introduced to the "Memorial Day Interdepartmental Taskforce for shooting black people" The guy’s only crime, other than driving a Hyundai, was “almost hitting five police officers”. Of course, cops did find a gun in the car three days later, claiming it wasn't "in plain sight" and that they needed a special lab to tear down the car. If they had to spend three days looking for a gun, Raymond Herisse must have held up something really scary to prompt police officers to make his face more aerodynamic, like his hands or something.
This is one of the tenets of being a "boy in blue". Someone messes with a cop or his family, and you go mess with them back, usually with a ruptured spleen and broken ribs because a suspect was "resisting arrest". That’s fine, and it’s a phenomenon as old as time.
That being said, if “almost” hitting five police officers is enough to warrant over 100 gunshots worth of dental work, where does it end?
The above video was shot from street level and catches a whole lot more detail, like how they opened up on the driver for no discernible reason. My favorite part however, is the part where they realize they’re being taped and start smashing phones. The man who owned the phone that shot this film took off as soon as they started pointing at people holding cell-phone cameras and started making croutons out of them.
The man, Narces Benoit, was pulled out of his truck at gunpoint, handcuffed, and had his phone stepped on and smashed. The only reason he was released so he could dig through the wreckage and find the phone’s memory card was another shooting erupted a few blocks down the road, and the police had to go intimidate witnesses and violate the constitution there.
I’m usually one to give the police officers the benefit of the doubt. The idea that they put their lives on the line every day isn’t a cliché, it’s a fact. They don’t wear criticism-proof vests, they wear bullet-proof vests. In my experience it’s the few that reflect badly on the rest, but recently police officers have been in the spotlight a lot more for “questionable behavior”, whether it’s more media involvement or an actual increase in the frequency of the events.
Add to that rumors of ex-cop and now ex-Mayor Carlos Alvarez pumping his administration’s inner circle full of other ex-cops and pretty much making Serpico look like a sunny fairy tale. Preferential hiring, corruption, intimidation, and misappropriations of funds are all alleged to have occurred during Alvarez’s reign, which is actually a fitting description of his mayoral term. Alvarez's indiscretions in this regard will be the focus of a future work in this series.
And you can be assured that after Carlos Gimenez get recalled we'll chronicle all of his indiscretions months after they might have actually been relevant.
Cops Being Douchebags is an ongoing series exposing the general abuse of authority that seems to be endemic to most of the Miami-Dade Law Enforcement community. Stay Tuned for more of the series.
