Taking the Law into One’s Own Hands
Seems that some of the folks who work for the sheriff’s department down here in Sussex can’t get it through their thick heads that they are not law enforcement officers.
I’ve received numerous reports of an incident that occurred last Friday near Lincoln. A sheriff’s deputy, in uniform and driving a sheriff’s vehicle, decided that he was going to make a traffic stop of someone who apparently was speeding. Sheriff’s vehicles down here have no lights or sirens, and no markings.
So this deputy gives chase to this car and pulls the driver over. Not sure how he accomplished this (since he was in uniform, he may have flashed a badge or something else). He told the driver, who works in corrections, that he was pulling him over for speeding, but since he noticed the badge on the driver’s uniform (which was hanging in the back window), he decided to let him off with a warning “as a professional courtesy.” The deputy told the driver he was going 75 in a 55 MPH zone. Don’t know how he figured that out since sheriff’s cars are not equipped with radar.
This is wrong on so many levels. First, neither the sheriff nor his deputies have police powers. They aren’t cops. And according to testimony the sheriff gave before the Sussex County Council a number of months ago, he decided he was going to let the constable certification of his deputies lapse. There is only one county in the state that has a police department and that’s NCCo. And the NCCo Police are separate from the sheriff’s department. Second, what would have happened if the driver had been someone who got mouthy with the deputy? What, G-D forbid, if the deputy had shot the driver if he had gotten up in the deputy’s face?
Sheriff Christopher and his sycophants in the Sussex GOP (St. Bodie Girl, Ayotte, Knotts, Curly, and the other munchkins) have been hellbent on creating some sort of police department resident in the sheriff’s office since last year’s election. They cite the Delaware Constitution as their source for justifying this. Boys, you’re wrong! Dead wrong!
But this incident cannot go left unpunished. I’m calling on the Attorney General’s office to investigate this matter and prosecute the deputy and anyone else in the sheriff’s department that has given these deputies the go ahead to impersonate police officers. It’s time for these shenanigans to end.
Tags: sheriff, Sussex County
Horrified! what if the person speeding had a passanger having a heart attack? or having a baby?
what would THAT liability look like to the county tax payer?
what if the speeder has just committed a crime?? – the most dangerous situations for a police officer are traffic stops and Domestic calls!
without lights, the Deputy could not be seen by oncoming traffic!
a further hazzard
WOW -imagine that liability
and without Police Powers?? if I did that I’d be charged with impersonating a police officer (a felony in Delaware)like this guy was:
http://dsp.delaware.gov/pio/County-Sussex/October%202009/10162009SexOffenderArrestedForInpersonatingAPoliceOfficer.htm
I’ll add that this needs to be investigated throughly and action taken – who else has it happened to and they may be too afraid to come forward?
Aoine – I was at the Purple Parrot the night that idiot was arrested. He was propositioning an underage busboy. Scared the kid out of his mind. And when he was told to leave, he said he was a cop.
The WGMD blog site has a new post about Erice Bodenweiser passing a resolution in his 37th dist. Rep. committee. The resolution supported the Sheriff in getting conflict resolution and firearms training.
Do we know which deputy it was? Just wondering if its a recent hire, or? How did you find out about this MJ? Newspaper? Blog? If its not in the news, it needs to be.
And FYI, you don’t need radar to establish speed. You can follow the car at the same speed for 1 mile or so and issue a ticket for speeding. That is, if you have the authority to issue a traffic citation.
Get on it MJ, this stuff does need to be stopped.
If this is true, the Sheriff’s office needs to be cleaned out from the top down. Enough is enough.
I’m as much against the overreach of law enforcement as the next Joe but I just feel in necessary to point out that cops don’t shoot people for “getting up in their faces”. Though they do sometimes look at them sternly.
“Though they do sometimes look at them sternly.”
Then, they fire them up with the Taser.
“cops don’t shoot people for “getting up in their faces”. ”
It would make me too sad to post the links to the obvious counterexamples.
Occam – I’m not saying that a fully trained police officer would do that. However, some yokel with a badge that reads “Deputy Sheriff, Sussex County” just might.
MJ
some yokel with a badge with a badge might lose their life if faced with a dangerous situation at someone’s door with a protection from abuse order and the guy is a mean drunk armed redneck. It is only reasonable that these deputies be trained at the police academy to respond with reasonable force.
Good Lord, do we really want some hopped-up Barney Fife responding to an Earl Bradley case?
Sitcom – your post reads as though it was written by St. Bodie Girl, Frank Knotts, or Don Ayotte. Your claims are bogus and you know it. How many times in the past 10 years, wait, 5 years, wait last year, did a deputy face a “dangerous” situation when serving papers?
Unless you have facts and stats to back up your claim, then all you have is mere conjecture.
They were trained – they had Contable certification. They are precluded by law from attending the Police Academy.The law would have to be changed to allow that to happen. doubt it will. and anyay – could they pass the physical, written, psych, background, and polygraph? I sincerely doubt it, A lot are retired and long in the tooth.
See DE title 11 Chapt 84 for requirments for the Police Academy – its a good read.
so why did the Sheriff allow that certification to lapse??
would it not have made more sense to re-certify his Deputies as they have been for years and then, in the interim, try to get more training?
Doing it the way he did it, allows for a HUGE libility for the county taxpayers, leaves the Deputies at risk and basically shows a stupid, selfish narrow-minded inability to put the people and the safety of his deputies before his political aspirations and ego.
and MJ has it correct – now many times in the past 10 years have they called for “back-up” serving a PFA – wait, wait, I know –
ZERO
records are kept on that sort of thing!! unless he started recently.
I challenge anyone to produce evidence that a police officer this side of the Carter administration has shot anyone for verbal misconduct.
dont ask a question you cannot afford the answer to:
http://mostlywater.org/california_transit_cop_fatally_shoots_man_back
oh Im sorry he struggled….
this guy did not do anything
http://www.wbaltv.com/r/23810790/detail.html
need more?? Id be happy to google it for you
Police have a set of procedures to escalate a verbal confrontation to the point where drawing a weapon might be justified.
There are too many lethal police-citizen confrontations that start with “refused to obey a verbal command,” without examining whether that command was reasonable, or was simply a provocation to trigger an escalation in an already agitated person. Once the command is issued, police are trained that they have to follow through to the maximum level of force if necessary, or lose authority.
They also have a new thing now called “excited delirium,” which is always diagnosed posthumously, and exists only to exonerate officers of unreasonable use of lethal force.
and then there is this one too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadou_Diallo_shooting
thought Diallo matched the description of a now-captured serial rapist and approached him
Diallo then reached into his jacket and withdrew his wallet..
The four officers fired forty-one shots, hitting Diallo nineteen times. The post-shooting investigation found no weapons on Diallo’s body; the item he had pulled out of his jacket was not a gun, but a rectangular black wallet
Questions??
Ock misses the point by making his test too narrow: “shooting” for “verbal misconduct.”
There are lots of ways for a cop to kill someone who complicates their day. It is a good thing the moderation filter only allows two links.
YouTube holds a seemingly inexhaustible supply of unwarranted taser incidents, some lethal.
My guess is that Occam has never had an encounter with the DC police.
Start here, Occam – http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/dcpolice/deadlyforce/police1page1.htm
Meanwhile in Wilmington, we are still waiting for reports on that promised investigation into the death of Eugene Allen.
And let’s not forget the two Prince George’s County (MD) cops who were just indicted for beating a University of MD student for no reason.
An indictment is a long way from a conviction. I have dealt with the DC police, they were curious and professional and allowed me to leave unshot when I was unable to produce ID.
Ah, VERBAL MISCONDUCT.
Like when DEREK HALE was suddenly surrounded by 15 ROMPING, STOMPING SWATTIES and he had the TEMERITY to say,”Let’s not do this in front of the kids”.