TAMPA, Fla. (AP) – A sheriff’s deputy was suspended for manhandling a sobbing woman who was speeding to a hospital to see her ailing father and didn’t want to wait for him to write a ticket.
After Deputy Kevin Stabins stopped Melissa Langston a second time in the hospital parking lot, video from his cruiser’s dashboard shows him yanking her from her car and slamming her against it.
“Please let me see my dad, ” she cries as he handcuffs her. “If it was your dad …”
Stabins cuts her off, saying, “Now you’re not going to see him, ’cause you’re going to jail.”
Stabins, 29, was suspended for five days without pay for using excessive force. Charges against Langston, 37, were dropped.
Full Story Here:
Fla. Deputy Suspended Over Rough Arrest
First I am going to preface this by saying, here we go with more of this PC bullshit from a Dept. that’s not backing it’s officer, read the full story and look at this from the officers standpoint…
Police officers hear every excuse in the book, they face a full range of emotions from those they have to deal with and they are not psychics or fortune tellers, all an officer on the street has to go on is INSTINCT and the information he can gather from the situation he is facing at that moment, and instinctively the officer has to think he is being fed a sad story so the citizen won’t receive the ticket or arrest or whatever action is in the works…
I have a very close friend that’s a retired police Captain, we’ve been friends forever I guess and I remember once he made a traffic stop, I’m not sure why, maybe a red light violation, he walked up to the car to address the woman driver and she drove off, not at a high rate of speed but fairly fast…
My friend follows her and makes his call-in as he must and they proceed into a really nice residential area and she pulls up to a swanky house, puts the car in park, shuts it off and heads for the house…
As she’s making tracks for the door she yells back over her shoulder to my friend, “I’ll be back out in a minute, and you can write me the ticket then, but right now I have got to go crap…”
What are you gonna do?? She really had to go, and if memory serves me correctly, she didn’t get the ticket, but in cases like the article above, you never know what the real story is and if the distraught person doesn’t give you time to actually gather some facts and then make a logical decision, well, they are normally going to suffer the consequences…
But it seems that in some places the officer is the one that’s going to suffer, as Bloviating Zeppelin pointed out in the linked comments to another thread yesterday, officers are getting to the point where they are afraid to do their jobs, for fear of losing those jobs…
And that’s exactly what happened here, and officer did his job and was placed on suspension for it, and the MSM tries to make the officer out to be THE BAD GUY with their commentary of the 1st paragraph, by trying to play on the bleeding heart emotions of the readers, well, I hope the folks that read here are a lot smarter than to fall for MSM bleeding heart ‘Oh poor me’ stories like that…
If this very disturbing trend of ostracizing police officers for doing their job continues, before too long we’re not going to have police officers, we’ll have hall monitors, and I can’t wait to here the cries of frustration when the bleeding heart PC among us get mugged or carjacked or suffer some other malady that requires the presence of a REAL police officer, and there are none…
I hate to be so negative but, for any number of reasons, that appears to be the developing trend. When a department, community, city, county, governmental entity removes discretion from an officer’s toolkit there shall be an attached hesitance on the part of the officer to go a millimeter beyond the minimum amount of work. It’s true in the military, in the private sector, the public sector, most any job. Cops are no different. Slap one down a sufficient number of times and one becomes leery of getting involved in much of any fashion. This trend is only becoming exacerbated by the current generation of hirees insofar as they live not for the job itself, but the quality of the job and the time off. If the quality of the environment suffers or there are overwhelming expectations, this generation of hirees tend to move on and/or towards their customary “fallback position” and that position = Mom & Dad. I cannot tell you the number of young deputies on my department who still live at home. It might perhaps shock many readers. The tendency of current and upcoming generations to actually sacrifice or even know the meaning of sacrifice diminishes. We have deputies who quit the department or refuse to hire on because they don’t like the color of the uniform, they don’t like the gun we carry, they can’t grow beards, we don’t drive the Dodge Charger, they can get more money for less work at a nearby agency or working for Big O Tires, we don’t have a sufficient number of offered vacation days per year, or they don’t wish to work for a time in the corrections (jail) venue prior to hitting the streets.
Perhaps this sounds like “weeping” on my end, but it is not. It is simply acknowledging reality and the reality of every other law enforcement agency — at least in California. Our inability to attract decent and qualified personnel diminishes every year despite our active soliciting of candidates in most every community. LAPD comes up to Sacramento and Northern California to cherry pick candidates because their Southern California gene pool is so tainted with gangbangers, drugs, and those absolutely avoiding anything to do with LAPD or any type of work requiring sacrifice, poor hours, shift work, etc. When I took the written test for my department in 1976, I took it at the Sacramento Convention Center with 2,300 other applicants. Per day. Now, we receive roughly 50 to 60 applicants and put 40 or so through the Academy, with about a 25% washout rate — and we are GENEROUS with that.
We are bordering on a hiring crisis. And not just MY department; it’s a national problem for emergency reponders, law enforcement, fire, safety and EMT personnel.
BZ
My Son is on a Dept in crisis right now, money, personnel, all of the above…
Our law enforcement is in a really bad position and we are going to pay if something is not done to reverse current trends…
I’m of two minds on this. Police officers do hear every story there is to hear and many of them are lies and cops have to sort the sheep from the goats. However if the manner of this woman’s arrest is true I do think excessive force was used. It wasn’t like the woman was a crack head or a PCP gremlin.
Cop stories of excessive force have been in the news of late. The cops in NYC who opened fire on a wedding party and the cops in Chicago who went wild are two examples. Having been a military cop many years ago I sympathize with cops, however there are many cops who believe that anyone who isn’t a cop is just a perp who hasn’t been caught yet. That’s the wrong attitude, but it seems to be the prevalent one among cops. On the other hand many non-cops believe that all cops are on the take/bullies and just haven’t been caught yet. And that’s the wrong attitude as well.
In any event stories like this one and the cops in NYC and Chicago give all cops a bad name. No easy answers on this as we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
Ok, I can see giving the officers the benefit of the doubt and side with caution.
However, peace officers are sworn to protect and serve the public. If a rational cop could for 2 seconds think outside the box and take some initiative and offer to help, there would be no news story.
Conversely, if the woman had asked to be escorted by the cop to the hospital, the whole situation would be a non-issue.
I would have done the same damn thing by taking off like she did, if my dad, or anyone else I cared about were in the hospital, and don’t say you wouldn’t either.
Cop deserves more than a mere slap on the wrist 5 day suspension. Termination is more in line.
That cop, unlike the majority of cops which I like, flat out sucks, and is a shame to law enforcement.
IF the cop had taken that 2 seconds to THINK, he may have been a DEAD cop…
Sorry, but it’s painfully obvious that you’re a blogger that has opinions based on something other than ‘street time’…
This ain’t T.J. Hooker or CSI Miami, it’s about real life on the street and staying alive, and going HOME when the shift is over, and after thinking about this one quite a bit, if I had been the Police Chief in this matter, that woman be out on bail and the officer would be out on patrol…
One thing WILL be understood, this is NOT going to turn into a BASH THE COPS thread, not from ANYONE…
The police DO have problems but IMO, and in this blog, THAT is the one that counts, their problems are exacerbated by IDIOTS thinking they can treat the cops any way they please…
To the poster that wanted to try and bring his BITCH FEST about everything a cop ever did that pissed him of into MY blog, NOT gonna happen…
This blog is PRO LAW ENFORCEMENT and will stay that way, I will not hesitate to point out what I consider to be wrong, and the opinions of current and former officers can and will be stated pretty much unfettered but crybaby BITCHES will not get a keystroke in on THIS blog…