Local Colorado officials have reached an $8.5 million settlement with a woman who hospitalized in 2022 after being left handcuffed in a police SUV that was then hit by a train.
Local Colorado officials have reached an $8.5 million settlement with a woman who was hospitalized in 2022 afterbeing left handcuffedin a police SUV that was then hit by a train.
The city of Fort Lupton and town of Platteville, Colorado, agreed on the settlement with the victim, Yareni Rios-Gonzalez, according to a release from the Fort Lupton Police Department. The settlement amount will be split equally between the town and city and paid by their insurers, according to attorney Eric M. Ziporin, whose office represents the city.
Rios, who was a suspect in a road rage case, survived the September 2022 collision but suffered nine broken ribs, a broken arm and other injuries.
Police aren't civilians and they aren't workers. Abolish their "union" as well as Qualified Immunity. They can earn the right to not be prosecuted while doing their job...
Police are supposed to be civilians. The whole idea of America avoiding mitary dictatorship was vested in the Army being under the control of the Commander in Chief (a civilian chosen by civilians), In conjunction with the police force being comprised of civilians, otherwise that force is just a military with a different name. You can make the argument they're above civilians in current times but this is by no mean integral to american policing, and is in fact antithetical to the American idea of police.
Don't get me wrong I still think they're problematic even in the theoretical best case scenario, but they're definitely civilians. Know you enemy, know them well.
The weird thing is this cop didn't put the suspect in her own car, but another officer's car who had parked on the tracks.
First off, what kind of fucking moron parks their car on fucking train tracks? Holy shit, that guy should have been punished as much as the officer who put the suspect in the car just for being so goddamn stupid.
Secondly, the cop should have noticed that the car she put the suspect in was on the tracks. She probably assumed the car was a safe place to put a person, since you would think nobody would be so stupid as to park on the tracks.
Oh, no. They were just idiots in this case. If they want to really hurt you, they'll, just force an EMT to administer a lethal dose of ketamine, or break an old woman's arm over a petty theft from a walmart and then leave her wounded and untreated in jail for hours, or shoot an unarmed kid that called 911 because he was tripping on too many drugs and needed help. (All things that have happened in the area in the last few years.)
To be fair, the former cop who did this isn't the one who parked the car there. She just placed the suspect into the closest cop car, which happened to be on the tracks. I still think she should be liable for putting someone in that situation, but it's not as bad as her parking on the tracks and then putting a person in a car she knew was on the tracks. Yeah, she should have noticed the car was on the tracks, but she didn't park it there and might have assumed nobody would be so fucking stupid as to park on the tracks.
Does her capacity to assume nobody would be that stupid somehow preclude her from seeing that the car was on the train tracks?
Even in the dark, it's pretty noticeable when you're on even the paved part of train tracks that cross a road. I don't really understand how she couldn't have realized where the car was parked by sight or by feel while putting the suspect into the back seat.
I think all of you claiming this was intentional need to remember Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Are cops evil bastards? Yes. But they also don't need to come up with something this convoluted to kill someone they want dead. On the other hand, there are demonstrably a ton of very stupid cops.