Florida Police Officers Caught on Tape Making Up Story About Accident

It was about a month ago that the here blog discussed a police officer who shot a 5-pound dog three times. That was a particularly grisly abuse of the power that we entrust to the men and women who are charged with protecting us. This is abuse of power on a much different, perhaps even worse, level.

In February, a Florida woman, Alexandra Gabriela Torrensvilas, was rear ended by an on duty police officer, Joel Francisco. She was charged with four counts of drunken driving and cited for an improper lane change.

Under normal circumstances the person who did the rear ending would be held at least partially responsible for not maintaining minimum safe distance between the vehicles. In this case, nope. The cops covered for themselves, and there's video to prove it. In this video (NSFW - lots of f-bombs), you can clearly hear the four officers concoct a story about how everything went down to place all the blame on Torrensvilas and absolve officer Francisco of everything. The video catches one police officer with this little gem:

"I don't want to make things up ever, because it's wrong, but if I need to bend it a little to protect a cop, I'm gonna. We'll do a little Walt Disney to protect the cop, because it wouldn't have mattered, because she is drunk anyway."

I think we can all agree that drunk driving is wrong, and this woman was obviously driving drunk and should be punished accordingly. However, these officers, by making up their little story, have virtually assured Torrensvilas a free pass - the report given by the officers is tarnished, likely inadmissible now, throwing the whole case into question. So, she skips out on her punishment, and our respect for the force as a whole is diminished.

Perhaps even more so than the shooting of the dog, where police officers can at least attempt to claim "following policy" as the excuse du jour, there is nothing that justifies the perpetration of fraud to make an officer look innocent. This is a blatant abuse of power, a snubbing of the nose at the respect we show the men and women who are supposed to be upholding the law, and it makes me sick.

This blogger firmly believes that all of these officers should promptly be stripped of their badges. You cannot have this sort of disregard for the people you are supposed to protect and serve and still be considered worthy of holding the badge.

Period.