Accountability
Ken Harrison
We averaged about two felony arrests per day on the Los Angeles police department ’ s 77th Division . It ’ s an area most people would refer to as Compton or Watts . About 50 % of those involved a gun , meaning we took about one gun per day off the street . Most of those involved a foot pursuit , vehicle pursuit or a fight . We ’ d book the suspects , write our report , take a shower and go home . We ’ d forget about it until a couple weeks later when we ’ d go to court and get interrogated about everything we had done .
Many of those arrests went to trial . At trial , a defense attorney would question everything an officer did . Every word he said , every action he took was analyzed exhaustively . A moment - often not more than 10 or 15 seconds - would be dissected in a way to condemn the officer so a jury could excuse what the defendant did .
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