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Top 5 Police Blunders: Tyler Kennedy Will Show You How To Pick Up Women Tyler Kennedy's another joker with a plan, which he explains in his
book, The Magic Triangle. However it appears he meets most of the women he dates at work. One problem: He's a sex
crimes investigator. For sleeping with the victims of people he's investigating, Tyler Kennedy rates chief bone-head of our
Police Blunders of the Week...
As anyone who's seen The Wire knows, it's all about the crime stats. Sometimes that means issuing a certain number of citations each week, nailing people for relatively benign crimes like talking on a cellphone while driving, illegally parking or failure to wear a seatbelt. Other times it's more pernicious, like downgrading rapes from a felony to a misdemeanor assault or refusing to take down victim's complaints to drive down the crime stats. Such cooking of the books is a violation of state labor law. Whistleblowing NYPD officer Adrian Schoolcraft took his complaints about low-balling crimes to Internal Affairs and the Quality Assurance Division, and finally shared damning recordings of precinct roll call meetings with reporters, sparking public outrage early this year. Afterwards Schoolcraft faced retaliation from forces within the department, culminating in him being forcibly taken from his home and held at Jamaica hospital's psychiatric ward against his will for six days. (One report had a person familiar with his psych profile calling Schoolcraft not crazy, just naive and idealistic, saying, "He doesn't understand the police culture." Uh-huh.) Last week Schoolcraft, who's suing the department for retaliation and harassment, received support in the form of another recording which was leaked to the New York Times. In the tape of a meeting of police supervisors, they were warned of "rats" wearing wires (splendid irony), and told to have every officer get five citations for each violation (seatbelts, cellphones, double parking and parking in bus stop zones) a week. Under-producing officers are to be kicked onto the midnight shift. Any officer who then fails to step up will be busted back to desk work, and they'll "start rating you below standards and look to fire you... I really don't have a problem firing people." So next time you receive a frivolous ticket, just remember, they're just saving their job, probably at the cost of tracking down real criminals. Yeah, that's the NYPD -- where idealism goes to die.
Protect, serve and humiliate? Well, it's a matter of whether you find it extraordinary to have your pants pulled down by the side of the road and be given an anal cavity search. The FBI is investigating after the second case in the Newport News, Virginia area in the last year. While a recent lawsuit against the city was thrown out for being filed after the two-year statute of limitations run out, there's been another case of roaming rubber gloves, and this time the victim's politically connected. Ashley Burnett, Jr. is the son of School Board member Priscilla Burnett, who was a Newport News police officer for 25 years before retiring in 2008. The 28-year old was cited for impeding traffic for allegedly walking in the middle of the road. When he refused to sign his citation, he was arrested. (Burnett claims he was offered no citation.) After arresting him they supposedly pepper sprayed him, hit him with their baton, and then pulled his pants down and administered an impromptu rectal exam (after putting on a rubber glove, of course). According to Virginia case law, unless the person is in jail, two exigent circumstances must be met to do a cavity search -- a clear indication that evidence concerning your case is located in a particular cavity, and a belief that the evidence will disappear or that you're somehow in danger. Unless he recently had Indian food -- which might meet the last standard -- there seems insufficient cause (and if he had, would you really want to be poking around down there?). Priscilla Burnett says there are witnesses to the whole incident. Meanwhile, the younger Burnett still remains in jail a week later for obstructing justice, resisting arrest and assault on a police officer. Just hope you don't ever hear the telltale snap of a glove while you're in handcuffs.
Sometimes enforcing the law requires extreme prejudice. But 16-year old Derrick White had only run onto the bus after allegedly participating in a schoolyard fight. It didn't warrant the Buford T. Pusser treatment administered by Houston Independent School District police officer Christopher Harris. The 27-year old cop went onto the bus to grab the Jack Yates High School student, and punched him three or four times, jumped on top of him, and kept punching him. It's apparently all captured on one of those bus cameras. White received a broken jaw, which will require the insertion of two steel plates and surgical braces with screws in them. He certainly won't be talking back to anyone anytime soon. According to White's mother, they've had a few run-ins with Harris previously, and she's already had two meetings with the officer and the principal. (Can you spell L-A-W-S-U-I-T? I knew you could.) A local activist who spoke on behalf of the family claims that White wasn't even involved in the fight. Harris, who is in his third year of working at the school, has been placed on administrative leave pending the result of the investigation. Hopefully next time he'll pick on someone his own size (or larger), and come to understand what a brutal ass-whupping feels like.
In March we told you about Rhode Island police officer Marcus Huffman. Huffman picked-up a 19-year old woman outside a Providence, RI nightclub in 2007 while on duty, and offered her a ride. Of course, it wasn't the kind that ended at her home. He took the woman -- who's blood alcohol was three times the legal level of intoxication -- back to the empty police substation when she said she had to use the bathroom. She passed out in the stall, where he raped her, and left. The woman awoke, unsure where she was, with her boxers and sports bra on the floor beside her. To add insult to injury, she's a lesbian who last had sex with a man as a freshman in high school. She described the pain she felt as ten times worse than she felt then. She eventually walked home, and her family called the police to report the assault. Guess who showed up with two other officers to take her complaint? Yup, Officer Charming. This wasn't the 40-year old cop's first case of sexual coercion. The 13-year veteran was charged with having sex with a 10-year old when he was a teenager, and for trying to extort oral sex from a prostitute while on duty, though both charges were dropped because of insufficient evidence. He was convicted in 1998 of assaulting a DMV worker, though that was presumably overlooked because everyone's at least had that impulse. Judge Netti Vogel was appalled by his behavior, calling it something out of a horror movie. She gave him 40 years in prison and an additional 20 years suspended sentence, 20 years probation, as well as ordering him to undergo sex offender counseling and register as a sex offender when he gets out (though by that time he'll probably have trouble even getting it up).
West Covina, California police officer Tyler Kennedy meets a lot of women in his line of work as a sex crimes investigator. It apparently gave him the insight necessary to write a self-published book entitled, The Magic Triangle: Coping with the Differences Between Men and Women. He cites as one of his qualifications his PhD from Columbus University in Mississippi, a notorious diploma mill. He suggests that "Men will accept any woman, on the other hand, that is chasing them around because the power of the Magic Triangle makes it very difficult to say no." It certainly was for Kennedy. He was demoted when it came to light that he'd begun dating a 39-year woman who he'd met while investigating her claims of rape against her ex-husband. Indeed, he charged the man and testified against him, never revealing his rather distinct conflict-of-interest. (When prosecutors finally discovered it, they had to throw out the charges.) The man's now suing the police department. But Kennedy just can't resist that Magic Triangle, particularly when it's OPP. He was suspended earlier this year when a 49-year old alleged victim of sexual abuse complained that Kennedy propositioned her and then sexually harassed her after she filed a rape charge against her ex-husband. Last week, 37-year old Alfonso Villalobos was found not guilty of a charge of child molestation, partly because of Kennedy's involvement. He'd evidently decided to prosecute a case that another sex crime investigator had decided not to pursue several months before. Of course, it turns out Kennedy also asked Villalobos' wife out on a date during the course of the investigation. (Are you noticing a pattern?) Oh, did we mention that Kennedy (at least at the time of writing the book) was married? Yeah, he's definitely prize dating material. And while he's been on suspension for nearly eight months, he's had plenty of time to work on a new book, something like Confessions of a Law Enforcement Sleazebag. While he hangs out, writes and trolls for women, he's bringing home $3,829 every two weeks, meaning he's earned nearly $70,000 already. Not too bad, even if it appears he's likely to (some day) lose his job. Maybe next time he'll take some of his own advice from the pages of The Magic Triangle: "In my opinion, women are devious and vindictive and should be left alone like a rattlesnake on a hot summer day." What can you say? He just can't resist poking around magic triangles. Maybe next time he's obsessed with triangles he can look into the Freemasons.
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