Whatever happened to the Concept of “Conflict of Interests”?
November 12, 2011 in Civil Resistance
A Dallas Police Officer Moonlighting for Bank of America? What’s wrong with that picture?
We have a Congress in Washington DC passing legislation that not only benefits their patrons who contribute to their campaigns, the legislation they pass benefits the elected officials’ own personal stock portfolios and net worth while those of the majority of their constituents decline. This is not some paranoid fantasy. It is verifiable fact that has been published on this site several times. You can see for yourself by going to Open Secrets and comparing your Senators and Representative’s net worth in 2008 to their net worth in 2009. As millions of Americans were losing their jobs and getting kicked out of their homes, the net worth of these people who are supposed to represent the majority was increasing by hundreds of thousands of dollars and in many cases by millions of dollars. Now if you don’t see that something is very wrong with this picture, then you are either a member of the 1% or you have been beaten down and propagandized by corporate-owned media to the point that your self-esteem has gone so far south that it is not even on the map any more.
Our Congress is representing Wall Street to the exclusion of the majority. Now we see here in Dallas where the members of the Dallas Police Department are representing Wall Street banks to the detriment of the public. We have a situation where off-duty policemen are guarding private corporations and actually attacking members of the public who are operating well within their rights as citizens.
The following excerpt is from The Dallas Morning News.
Last night, (November 10, 2011) the Dallas Police Department discovered a new video of the Occupy Dallas demonstration that occurred on November 5, 2011. The video shows a Dallas Police Officer, who was working off-duty for Bank of America, push a demonstrator off a planter in front of the building. Chief David Brown has ordered the officer placed on restricted duty and initiated a formal investigation into the officer’s actions. The restricted duty assignment will also prohibit the officer from working off-duty employment until the departmental investigation is complete. In light of this development, the Police Department has requested that the Dallas County District Attorney and the Dallas City Attorney proceed no further with the criminal cases alleged to have occurred until further consultation takes place. These meetings are anticipated to occur next week. The Dallas Police Department is dedicated to the protection of all members of the public. Any allegation of police misconduct is taken seriously and will be vigorously investigated. The Police Department encourages any witnesses who would like to make a statement or who have additional video to contact the Internal Affairs Division at (214) 671-3986.
If you watch this video from frames 25 to frame 32, you can see the officer (a large black man in the upper middle of the screen pushing the protester (Stephen Benavides). Mr. Benavides did not fall on his own shortly before he was arrested for felony assault on another police officer and resisting arrest. Police had previously said there was no indication Benavides was pushed as he and his supporters have claimed.
Stephen Benavides, the victim of police brutality, was in jail for four days!
Benavides was in the Dallas County Jail until Wednesday night, when he posted more than $50,000 bond on the charges. His confrontation with police last Saturday sparked a riot that included seven other arrests.
Protesters have alleged Dallas police acted overly aggressive in arresting Benavides and others. Dallas police officials said earlier this week that a preliminary review of the handling of the protest revealed no misconduct. [Note: if we allow this incident to become standard police routine, Stephen Benavides is not the only one in trouble, we all are.]
Chief David Brown has said Benavides was told to get off the planter because it was Bank of America property and that he refused to comply. As you can see from the video below, that is half a truth (if that) which is the same thing as a lie. Benavides said in a phone interview Friday morning (November 11, 2011) that the officer on the planter, Jimmy Hollis, told him to get off the planter but gave him almost no time to do so. [This is substantiated by the time lapse in the video.] ”It was not but a split second, a split second reaction by him and he shoves me off the planter,” Benavides said. “I fall down, I land on the curb, I bust my ribs up and eveyrhting else is kind of out there on the videos.”
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ILWQ COMMENTS: This incident and how it is handled is relevant to all people in the USA. Support Occupy Dallas and stop the scourge of taxpayer paid employees moonlighting as hired thugs for corporate America.
A citizen who is acting well within his rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the USA is brutalized by a police officer who is not only being paid by the taxpayers of Dallas, he is also being paid by Bank of America. If you don’t see a problem with that, then you need to visit Colombia and ask around about the police goon squads called the AUC. They are paid by U.S. corporations to murder people who want to start unions to protect workers. Of course then that’s where the hand-in-glove relationship between Washington and Wall Street comes into play. Just before he went to work for Obama as the Attorney General of the USA, Eric Holder got Chiquita Brands executives off the hook with a fine, even though conclusive evidence (a check signed by Chiquita Brands) pointed to the fact that they paid off the members of the goon squad who murdered the unionist.
In addition to conflict of interest and police brutality, there are other problems with this story as well: Why does a Dallas Police Officer have to supplement his income by working off-duty? First of all,this seems to indicate that the officer is not being paid a living wage in the first place. If so, that needs to be corrected.
Second of all, we all know that when we work more than 40 hours a week, many aspects of our lives suffer. Of all people, police officers need a break from the kind of work they do. All police officers should be paid a living wage and NO police officers should be moonlighting at ANY job for ANYONE.
NOTE:
Base pay for Dallas Police Officers who are trainees is $41,690. After two years it is $43,754. At ten years it is $64,651. The 2010 Census reports that in Dallas, Male full-time workers had a median income of $32,265.
