PUREBRED + MUTT=MUTT

PUREBRED + MUTT=MUTT: Joan Conrow’s entry today certainly tries to shed a different light on the bizarre rants from Police Chief Darryl Perry and Police Commission Chair Tom Iannucci with the jaw dropping news that, according to a very reliable source, Perry didn’t write his own letter and that the letters were intentionally written and submitted to the paper to lift morale and unite the police force against Juan Wilson, whose column spurred the letters to the editor.

And the brainiac behind this politically suicidal “plan” was Deputy Chief Mark Begley who allegedly wrote the letter for the Chief.

The theory goes that it’s so bad internally at KPD that they chose to unify the department through Machiavellian distractions- a virtual bombing the Reichstag.

Joan also notes that her source says that two cops were fired by Perry. We’d sure like to know more about that knowing that if they were indeed terminated that should, by law, be public information upon that termination. And if their offences were serious enough for firing, if they are being prosecuted and if not why not. Is there a cover-up in the Chief’s office too?

She also tells us Perry isn’t thinking about Tasers all day although that may be problematic in and of itself. He still apparently buys the “no one has ever died due to police taser use” corporate line despite hundreds of documented and reported cases (including documentations personally presented to him as we recently reported ) including many occurring because the protocol for use has moved off the original “in lieu of deadly force” to condoning use to restrain combative and even uncooperative individuals..

But the question is whether this is the way to unite the department- around defending the reported abuses of power by ridiculing anyone who wants to point out the emperor has no clothes?

Is this the best they can come up with? Let’s act like a bunch of battling bloods and crips who come together to “take care of” those who question the way we “conduct business”? By aping the adolescent abusive attitude and locker-room bluster and swagger that characterizes “bad cops” virtually telling us that our worst fears are true? By intimating that the cop who does the “toughest job in the world” while maintaining his or her cool and treating even the dregs of society with all due respect for them and their rights is a not welcome at KPD? What’s next- calling them “pussies” or “girlie-men”?

Unless a whole bunch of professionals- from defense lawyers, to prosecutors, to councilors and other friends of the courts and force- are lying, there is a rogue faction at KPD that acts like Gestapo storm troopers and routinely abuses their inherent power we grant them to deny people their rights?.

And now, in the name of “morale” they are trying to seek a straw man to unite the good cops with the bad ones? Have they heard the one about the rotten apples? If, as Joan’s source says, 20% of officers’ time is spent with presumably good cops complaining about abusive cops, is the answer to stop the complaining or stop the abuses?

The factionalism in KPD has been going on since before statehood. It was structured originally around the Hawaiian-Japanese Democrat-Republican rifts (and probably something else before that) but evolved to where the feuding factions are still there but no one remembers why they started feuding.

If now it’s “good cops vs. bad cops” it sounds like a step in the right direction.

Are the ones who do their “impossible job” with tact and aplomb being asked to unite behind the creeping militarization and resulting power abuses when the community questions them?

So let’s get this straight. They’re using the excuse of this factionalism to say that the conscientious and corrupted have to co-exist?

You don’t root out corruption by postponing the day of reckoning in the name of unity. Neither ever happens. All you do in that is to tell the good cops that you are asking them to come together with the crooked ones. That’s how this situation got to be the way it is- suborning abuses of power.

The fact that this wasn’t a mistake and some unwise public venting but a refined coordinated strategy makes the situation all the worse- it doesn’t say much for those involved.

Who thought it was a good idea to unite behind sending a “screw the public” attitude?

I can just hear the politicians now, even those who are minimally politically astute. Tom and Darryl and now Mark must be holding the phone a foot away as even dullards like Bryan yells “what were you thinking, you dumb f---?” for making the molehill of Juan’s column- which was a one day story (if people even read it buried in the paper as it always is)- into mountain of the headline news playing itself out every day in the paper the blogs and living rooms across the island.

We’re more troubled than ever if this is what the KPD leadership thinks is proper- sacrificing all “community relations” for a juvenile “enemy of my enemy is my friend” gambit?

Good thing there’s a new KPD “community relations specialist” in this year’s budget right in keeping with the administration’s famous “PR before service” motto.

We’ve heard some of the right wing yahoos praising the dangling of this raw meat saying that it’s ok because it’s the hardest job there is. But it’s not the hardest job just because they put their lives on the line every morning. Firemen do that too in being “Kauai’s Bravest” It’s because we have a bill of rights and freedoms that make the jobs of “Kauai’s Finest” the most difficult- we ask them to respect everyone’s rights, even- make that especially- those they arrest, at all times when others hurl not just abuse but objects and even bullets at them.

Those are the kinds of cops the community wants. And those are the ones leadership has chosen to disrespect telling the good cops “why bother”- let’s just unite at the lowest common denominator.