Columnist Jamala Rogers
A sign outside of the St. Louis Metropolitan Towing Company warns that a guard dog is on duty. It’s high time that St. Louis taxpaying citizens get someone on duty to guard us.
The recent expose on police using impounded cars is yet another chapter in the continuing saga of abuse by the police department that goes from the street cop all the way to the top brass.
While citizens wait for justice in the case of police stealing tickets from the evidence room to the Cardinal’s World Series game in 2007, the story breaks about the hook up for cops and their friends and family by Metro Towing.
It is no accident that Aimie Mokwa, Police Chief Mokwa’s daughter, has been a constant beneficiary of Metro Towing’s cars. Dad helped to set up the specialized towing company with the primary purpose of grabbing up the nicely kept, late-model autos taken from so-called crimes.
“So-called,” because don’t think for a nanosecond that there aren’t people out there whose cars were unnecessarily seized and who were smacked with trumped up criminal charges in order to get the vehicle.
The issue here that keeps surfacing again and again is the utter abuse of authority by the police department and its ability to hide behind the Police Board, the judicial system and the blue wall of silence.
Even when cops abuse one of their own (as when St. Louis County police officer Tom Ziegler shot fellow cop, Patricia March, in the face a few years ago), they don’t seem to get the same punishment as their lay counterparts.
Even when cops abuse their significant other, the “other” faces the same lack of justice as the rest of us who get verbally or physically assaulted by a law enforcement officer. As one wife said in her case, every time she threatened to call the police, her man reminded her “I am the police.”
By the way, the department keeps records on their officers’ acts of domestic violence like they keep them on incidents of police terror on the community.
It is time that we demand accountability, not a cover up, of police misconduct. The community must demand an independent investigation of the police department. This can’t be done by a State-appointed board whose members are trying to cover their own butts. We can never get to the truth if the department refuses to honor the Sunshine Law or other requests for cooperation. By the way, the department is being taken to court for violating that law as well.
We must continue to demand local control. Sitting by and watching the rogue cops rule the department and the streets is only widening the trust gap between them and citizens. In reading the various blogs regarding the latest commandeering abuses, I found little support and justification for the police department.
I say let’s unite – battered women, abused cop partners, terrorized citizens and righteous officers – to bring dignity and responsibility back to the police force. Otherwise, we will be faced with miniature corrupted versions of the New York and Los Angeles Police Departments.