theatlantic | On-duty police officers appear to be eating edible pot products—OC Weekly transcribes words they spoke while egging one another on. (“Those candy bars are pretty good,” one said. “I kinda feel light-headed though.”) Other
dialogue offers a number of insights into the subculture of this
narcotics unit. Take the woman with an amputated leg that police
encountered on entering the dispensary. “Did you punch that one-legged
old benita?” one police officer asks another. The other cop laughingly
replied, “I was about to kick her in her fucking nub.” These are people
Santa Ana taxpayers empower to use lethal force at their discretion.
Later, OC Weekly got access to a fuller version of the footage. They marvel at what it contains:
Hon. Jonathan Fish has been an Orange County Superior Court Judge since 2008, but before that he was a prosecutor with the district attorney’s office who specialized in narcotics cases.
In the footage, an unidentified Santa Ana Police officer is talking to another cop as they wrap up their raid on the marijuana dispensary.
“You ever work with John Fish, the DA?” the officer asks.
“He was just in when I got there,” his partner responds.
“He's the judge that signed our warrant,” the first officer continues, adding that he had just spoken with Judge Fish and had enjoyed a good laugh with him about their old times together. “He's the fucker that pulled into a gas station on our way to the Staples Center and goes, ‘Let's buy some beers and drink 'em out of a red cup.’ I go, ‘That’s not going to be obvious.’ There we are at an am/pm getting styrofoam cups and pouring our beers into them. That fucking blew me away.”
That is all part of the backstory.
What’s
new is the way that the cops caught misbehaving on camera and the
police union that represents them have responded to an internal police
investigation—not with embarrassment, contrition, and public apologies,
as would befit trustworthy people of good character, but with shameless,
discrediting chutzpah: They’ve sued to keep now public video of their
indefensible behavior from their overseers!
