I have long complained about the absurd behavior of police and prosecutors after the "biker gang shootout" outside a steak house in Waco in 2015. Nine people were killed, and the police arrested just about every biker present, 177 people. Over the four years since only one of the accused has ever been brought to trial, and that ended in a mistrial after several jurors voted to acquit, freely proclaiming afterward that they thought all the cops were lying. Now Waco has a new prosecutor, who unseated the old one in part by constantly complaining about this case, and he has just dropped all the remaining prosecutions.
The new prosecutor, Barry Johnson, has not really said what the problem is, but enough hints have been dropped that we can make good guesses. Many of the bikers said that the police opened fire first, and the Houston Chronicle reported that at least four of the men who died were killed by police bullets. My theory all along has been that the more the investigators learned, the worse the cops looked, and so they lost interest in establishing the truth and put their efforts into covering up police misdeeds. The dropping of all the charges makes me even more convinced that this is what happened.
I was recently reading about police training in America compared to in other affluent developed countries. For example, in Germany, the minimum amount of training required to become a police officer is 130 weeks, or 2.5 years.
ReplyDeleteIn America, the average training length is 19 weeks.
If I had to point to any one factor that I would suspect as contributing wildly to our police killing so many innocent people, that would habe to be it.