I'm not a lawyer either, although I do work with them, and I have worked on a variety of police misconduct cases for plaintiffs over the years. My experience was that there were a small number of officers who had lots of complaints against them -- very few ending up in lawsuits.
In my mind, it is a miracle that plaintiffs ever win any of the cases given that your average citizen/juror [not unlike many people on this list] does not want to believe that there are thumpers, does believe that the police should be excused because of the awfulness of the job, does believe that it wouldn't happen to them because they are "good" people and the police don't thump you unless you deserve it or did "something" -- and that often the relevancy rulings exclude some of the previous complaints from being disclosed to the jury. The fact that plaintiffs do win cases in spite of these ubiquitous attitudes is a testament to the unreasonable or incredible brutality that some of our citizens have been exposed to from some of these thumpers. The city settles because they know that when juries do have people on them who are willing to listen fairly to BOTH sides, the city has a huge amount of exposure. That said, there are many good, honest and reasonable cops, and it is for their sake as well as the rest of us that it is important to root out the thumpers. From what I've seen, there are these holdover thumpers going back to when being a thumper was encouraged who infest the culture -- and some of the younger cops buy into it. Lawsuits have helped the city to realize the importance of reining the thumpers in -- lawsuits put the pressure on. If we want less lawsuits, we need to have less thumpers. diane wiley tangletown REMINDERS: 1. Think a member has violated the rules? Email the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
