Who takes a gun to a snowball fight? Why, a police detective does, of course.
According to Radley Balko’s article, “December 19 snowball fight took an ugly turn when snowballers pelted a red Hummer … The driver, D.C. police Detective Mike Baylor, emerged from his vehicle in plain clothes, and without identifying himself as a police officer confronted the snowballers.”
Of course, people began making phone calls about some guy in the street waving a gun around at people. What resulted was one person being arrested for hitting the detective with a snowball, an attorney named Daniel Schramm. (Btw, he didn’t hit the detective with a snowball.)
Of course, nothing happened to the police detective at all. But there’s more …
Multiple videos were actually taken of the entire thing, from multiple angles. It became even more outrageous when, despite the very many witnesses, and the many different videos clearly showing what happened … the police department stated that the detective didn’t have his gun drawn.
Even before anything resembling an investigation, the department was rushing to clear the detective’s name. From Radley Balko’s article:
Despite the fact that video and photographic evidence of Det. Baylor drawing his gun were already widely available on the web, MPDC Assistant Chief Pete Newsham initially issued a series of what can only be called bold-faced lies. Newsham first told the Washington City Paper, “There was no police pulling guns on snowball people.” In fact, there were two.
But there’s more. The Washington Post goes on to report:
Assistant Chief Pete Newsham, who leads the department’s investigative services bureau, said it appears the patrol officer acted appropriately, and the worst the detective might have done is use inappropriate language in dealing with the snowball fighters…
At some point, Newsham said, the detective approached the group of snowball fighters and had “some kind of interaction” with them. He said the detective holstered a cellphone, and someone from the crowd called to report a man with a gun.
A cellphone? Multiple witnesses saw a gun. Multiple images and video show, clearly, a gun. Reason TV has a video, where you can see the detective wave a gun after he climbs out of his car.
Newsham’s rush to clear Baylor’s name came before the slightest bit of investigation. … He’s in charge of the MPDC unit responsible for investigating officer misconduct. And here he was disseminating clear and provable lies.
Forget the gun-waving Baylor. This is the real scandal. You’d be awfully naive to think the only time Newsham has publicly lied to defend a MPDC officer accused of misconduct was coincidentally the one time the officer’s accusers were tech-savvy hipsters armed with cell phones and video cameras. …
What I get out of it is this: yet another example of how technology is further empowering We The People. We are turning the cameras on the political class, while at the same time forcing them to shut down their own cameras.
Now, what to do about the virtual strip searches … ?
