The Bad Apples Control The Bunch: USA Today Report Details Law Enforcements Punishment Of Good Cops
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Plenty of people try to minimize police misconduct by claiming what we witness day after day after day is just the work of a few "bad apples." That's only half of the adage, though. The rest of it notes that bad apples spoil the whole bunch. Keep bad apples around long enough and you're going to have to throw out the bunch eventually.Apply this phrase to cop shops and you'll see why cop proponents only half-quote it. Apply this phrase to cop shops and you'll see where it completely fails: not only do bad apples make the good apples worse, but the bad apples have the power to rid the bunch of as many good apples as possible.An investigation by USA Today shows why it's easy to keep good cops down and enable bad cops to do their worst. Law enforcement culture has dictated a thin blue line -- one that shields bad cops from accountability and allows even the best of cops to assume the public's unwillingness to turn a blind eye to misconduct makes them the enemy.But the most dangerous enemies are those behind the blue line. And they must be removed by any means necessary. (Non-paywalled link here.)To many in law enforcement, snitching against another cop is a betrayal that can’t go unpunished.Those who enforce this code – the blue wall of silence – have stuffed dead rats and feces into fellow officers’ lockers. They’ve issued death threats, ignored requests for backup, threatened family members and planted drugs on the officers who reported wrong.Department leaders often condone these reprisals or pile on by launching internal investigations to discredit those who expose misconduct. Whistleblowers have been fired, jailed and, in at least one case, forcibly admitted to a psychiatric ward. USA Today has receipts, thanks to public records requests and information given to it by law enforcement whistleblowers. There are good cops out there. But they're up against a system that equates reporting of misconduct to be a form of treason. Bad cops and their employers/enablers ensure no good deed goes unpunished.In South Carolina, an officer leaked the fact that fellow deputies beat a prisoner who later died in custody. In Florida, a detective who specialized in child sex crimes reported a captain who had impregnated a 16-year-old girl and then paid for her to have an abortion. In Oregon, a sergeant complained that a co-worker bragged about killing an unarmed teenager. After speaking out, all of them were forced out of their departments and branded traitors by fellow officers. The same silencing of whistleblowers we've observed at the federal level also occurs in state and local law enforcement agencies. Retaliation abounds. The "official channels" for reporting wrongdoing often involve officials whose wrongdoing is being reported. And if none of that works, a perverse form of peer pressure is deployed -- one that ensures whistleblowing cops will never have backup if they need it and will be frozen out of transfers and promotions.No one is exempt, according to this USA Today investigation. Agencies large and small engage in these unofficial practices. Departments well-represented or run by minorities are no better than agencies with white leadership or whose workforce contains mostly white males. The presence of a police union may make things worse in terms of accountability, but even agencies without unions regularly punish whistleblowers. The only thing that ultimately matters is the profession: an equalization that serves the badge rather than the public.This loyalty to each other, rather than their true employers (the general public), aligns law enforcement agencies with the criminal world, where snitching is an unforgivable sin that demands swift and brutal retribution. Officers who've abused their power are protected by a system that ends the careers of officers who want to see their agencies live up to the ideals they profess.And, as if the point of this investigation needed to be driven home, a police union has stepped up to confirm the implications of the USA Today report. Not only is this officer no longer welcome in his own department, but his union has now basically stated it's willing to throw its (paid for by union dues) legal weight behind cops accused of all sorts of malfeasance but will have nothing to do with a cop who has exposed wrongdoing.An Illinois police union on Wednesday ousted from its membership an officer facing criminal charges for exposing a squad car video that showed his fellow officers slapping and cursing a man dying of a drug overdose.The case of Sgt. Javier Esqueda, a 27-year veteran of the Joliet Police Department, was featured in September as the first installment of the USA TODAY series “Behind the Blue Wall,” an investigation involving more than 300 cases of police officers over the past decade who have spoken out against alleged misconduct in their departments. And as for the constant insinuation that law enforcement agencies harbor millions of "good" cops, contrary to public opinion, it would be nice if bootlickers and police officials could explain anything reported above, much less this damning indictment of law enforcement's unwillingness to police themselves.Esqueda was one of 30 police officers who signed a letter to congress this summer urging lawmakers to pass protections for police whistleblowers. Thirty. Out of nearly 700,000. Saying you're for police accountability means nothing if you're not willing to even sign your name to a letter asking federal legislators to stand by those who report wrongdoing. If you need a better argument for defunding police agencies, this is it. When a culture is so entrenched it can't be rooted out with gradual reforms, perhaps the better solution is to burn it to the ground and rebuild with better policies and protections in place.
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posted at: 12:00am on 01-Dec-2021
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Miramax Survives Copyright Dispute Over 'Pulp Fiction' Poster Initiated By Opportunistic Photographer
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The iconic film Pulp Fiction appears to be a hot topic of conversation lately. We recently discussed Miramax's laughable lawsuit against Quentin Tarantino over his plan to offer NFTs for certain unreleased and unused portions of the film's drafted scripts, alongside the director's audio commentary revealing his thought processes and "secrets" surrounding the screenplay. While that whole thing is currently making Miramax look very confused as to intellectual property laws, there was recently a lawsuit ruled in Miramax's favor over the film's most iconic poster.You know the image. It's the one with Uma Thurman laying stomach-down on a bed, smoking a cigarette, surrounded by guns and paperback books. The photo for that poster was taken by Firooz Zahedi at his studio in 1994 and has since become one of the most iconic movie posters ever. In May of 2020, Zahedi sued Miramax for copyright infringement over the extensive use of the photo on merchandise, claiming he never authorized its use for those instances. Miramax claimed the work had been done as a work for hire, which makes all the sense in the world, except, well...Miramax claimed that he took the picture as part of a work-for-hire agreement for "Pulp Fiction," but sometime in the last 27 years, the studio misplaced the signed documents that made the agreement official, so it couldn't dig up anything to prove that. Now, the whole "Sorry, the dog at my work for hire paperwork" excuse typically doesn't fly well in court proceedings, no matter how much logical sense such an arrangement might make. In this case, however, I mentioned that the court found in favor of Miramax. How did that happen?Well, it came down to the timing of Zahedi's suit coupled with the delay in filing it despite having documented knowledge of its wide use and distribution. And that documentation came in the form of an Instagram post.Six years ago, Zahedi's stepson posted an Instagram photo of him with the action figure. The caption on that post read, "Happy Birthday to my Stepdad @fitzphoto [emojis] Turns out he didn't get toy royalties for his famous photo of Uma TM... But at least he has the toy now..."Zahedi replied to the post, "Thanks... Sometimes it's best to settle for the little things in life."In other words, there's a record in 2015 that shows Zahedi knew Miramax had repudiated his ownership at least that far back. The three-year statue of limitations for that ended in 2018, so as far as the judge was concerned, it was case closed. And so the court indicated two things. First, the statute of limitations is 3 years from the time that Zahedi discovered the "unauthorized" use of his work, if we stipulate that this was in fact not work for hire. Second, that Instagram post demonstrates publicly that Zahedi had that knowledge in 2015. The suit was filed some 2 years late, therefore.And so Miramax came out the winner. It may still be kind of crappy to not credit the photographer out of courtesy, but there is no legal liability here. And, frankly, I don't believe for a second that the studio didn't contract the movie photo as a work for hire arrangement, though it turns out that is not a factor in this ruling.
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posted at: 12:00am on 01-Dec-2021
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