An Impassioned Defense of Law Enforcement Officers
San Bernardino DA Takes Jon Stewart and the Daily Show to task.
San Bernardino County district attorney Mike Ramos was recently watching television when he noticed Jon Stewart of the Daily Show reporting incorrect information about an incident in his county.
Ramos took to YouTube and created a video in which he scolds Stewart and offers a powerful defense of law enforcement officers everywhere.
Carman Tse of the LAist reported:
Video: San Bernardino D.A. Calls Out ‘The Daily Show’, Show Apologizes For ‘Sloppy’ Mistake
Comedy Central’s news commentary show The Daily Show tweeted an apology to the San Bernardino district attorney after host Jon Stewart listed a Victorville man, who had previously died in an incident with a sheriff’s deputy, as another victim of police shootings in the United States.
On the Monday, December 1 episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart opened the show with a bit about the nationwide response to the events in Ferguson, Missouri. Stewart ran through a list of black men killed in police shootings across the country, listing Dante Parker, who was killed in a controversial incident with a San Bernardino Sheriff’s Deputy in Victorville in August. Unlike the other victims Stewart listed, including 12-year old Tamir
BrownRice of Cleveland, Parker was not shot by police but actually died after being Tased.
Watch the video. Ramos singles out the Daily Show but his message applies to the media at large.
For his part, Jon Stewart said in a tweet Friday that he will apologize on Monday.
.@sbcountyda: You're right re Dante Parker. Sloppy to put him in our list of shootings. TV apology coming Monday…Larger point still stands
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 5, 2014
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
Thank you Mike Ramos. The truth needs defenders.
Thank you Aleister for posting this.
Stand by for another non-apology apology from another leftist.
“Larger point still stands” — Does it?
People willing to sacrifice individuals for the sake of “Larger Issues” seek injustice.
Prosecutors shouldn’t be the ones defending the police. In fact, that’s part of the problem, they defend the police.
Prosecutors themselves set a lot of the things we see happening in motion; the over charging and the zealous enforcement with swat teams for misdemeanor arrests.
A lot of the decisions that are made are made by prosecutors. Who are themselves unsupervised with few held to account for their misdeeds.
It seems the justice system these days is run by and for prosecutors with the judges just hanging around the court house till their tee time. No oversight, no one to guard against injustice. The fox controls the hen house.
It’s prosecutors that benefit the most from plea bargaining and they’ve taken our legal system which succeeded in accomplishing some justice and turned it into a street to prison law mill grinding out misdemeanor citizens into prisoners for the voters to be shown how crime busting the prosecutors are doing so they can keep their job and their power. When what they really wind up doing is manufacturing crime and criminals to fill cells for future budgetary increases.
It’s time the entire system came under scrutiny by some outside agency. One not afflicted with political considerations or union endorsements.
That makes sense, but it seems that if biased prosecutor oversight is the issue, they should come up with better examples than Trayvon or Brown to put this in the national spotlight.
Garner was less violent and video stirs people up, but the focus should be on whether actual procedure was followed in the arrest, since most are demanding the officer’s hide for being overzealous. Following the broken window theory of Giuliani, Garner had to be dealt with, but details on those events aren’t fully revealed. Perhaps the shopkeeper that called doesn’t want to get burned out.
So far the “larger point” Stewart alludes to has nothing to do with this grand jury decision, which has raised such a ruckus. Those making that vague larger point need to delineate the issue, rather than try to co-opt the message from the grand jury. (which you do, imo)
I meant you do delineate it, imo … it is already co-opted by Stewart and others.
“It’s time the entire system came under scrutiny by some outside agency. One not afflicted with political considerations or union endorsements.”
That would be called “the voters”.
Unless, of course, you mean some super-powerful trans-governmental outfit like The Justice League or the UN.
Which sorta blows all that Federalism stuff all to hell…
Cripes.
But there is a kind of remedy…strengthen the grand jury system, and make plea-bargaining MUCH less do-able.
If plea bargaining became less doable, the Justice System would grind to a halt in a matter of weeks, if not days. The reason? No one would have any incentive to do anything except say to the District Attorney “fine, let’s go to trial.” The sheer preparation necessary for the DA’s office would cause it to fail.
As it is NOW in El Paso County, on a standard “docket call” jury day in any given County Court, we have, on average 20 cases set for trial. In EACH Court. Only ONE of those cases can be heard in trial. The DA’s will make decisions on which cases to dismiss, and which ones to reset for another trial date. If they are reset, they stack on top of whatever case load was set to be heard THAT day (so, let’s say the District attorney dismisses 5 cases out of the 20 and resets 15. Now on the reset docket date, you now have 35 cases to be heard.
I hear you, Chuck, but I don’t agree with your larger point.
If the courts are a bottle-neck, we need more courts. We can’t just open the gates and let the (real) offenders out, and the plea-bargaining system is WAY over used. IMNHO.
jakee
Maybe you should take some time and volunteer at your local DA for several months. Because your assertions are pretty much without merit.
Do you honestly believe that every complaint filed, misdemeanor or felony should have a jury trial? That no defendant should be allowed to plea out prior to said trial?
Do you have ANY idea of how many cases are submitted to the DA office in your county on a yearly basis?
I’m a Chief Clerk in one of Mike Ramos’ offices. Our county has 60K plus cases in our system so far this year. Due to our lovely governor & budget, our criminal courtrooms have been reduced in number and we hear criminal cases in only 4 courthouses across the whole county.
Do the math.
jakee
another thing, since Brown’s AB109 “Prison realignment” 3 years ago, crime has gone up 20%. Now with Prop 47 and its wholesale reduction of certain crimes from possible felony to misdemeanors (including commercial burglary under $950) crime will go up again.
Just how much crime are you willing to tolerate?
Prosecutors shouldn’t be the ones defending the police. In fact, that’s part of the problem, they defend the police.
Sorry, prosecutors are squarely in the hot seat of deciding whom to prosecute and whom not. It’s their job to decline to prosecute when there’s insufficient evidence of a crime. Failure to prosecute is not ‘defending’.
Prosecutors also have bosses. Generally those are elected officials. Vote them out and replace them if you have issues with their prosecutors – they’re sensitive to public opinion, and hopefully possessed of enough judgement to tell a real problem from a ginned-up media-storm which could cause as much injustice as the wrongful punishment of a prosecutor.
It’s true that abuse of prosecutorial discretion for the sake of plea bargains – making the process the punishment, with neither trial nor conviction – needs some fixing. Tellingly, the solution of that twist in legal procedure is in making grand jury process more like that in Ferguson – where ALL evidence is placed before the jury, and jurors and their decisions are given the respect due to citizens.
Republicans, can learn a thing or two from this DA. THIS is how you take on the Left Media complex.
By promptly rebuking and reprimanding every false syllable, word, phrase and statement uttered by members of the Left Media complex before it takes root as truth in the mind of the low-info public.
Indeed, it would be Giuliani’s broken window theory applied to politics …. nip it in the bud, as Deputy Fife said.
The left does this too, but with disregard to fact, and they tend to get ahead of the story. Palin has a target on a campaign flyer, and in a couple of days LIVs think she was directly involved in shooting Giffords, or at the least it was a tea partier that got her coded message.
Or Hillary and Jarrett concoct the video story and release it along with news of the attack. Years later LIVs at most think “mistakes were made”.
But that’s the whole problem of the left taking over media and Hollywood … they control the propaganda/message, and the Truth barely gets out of bed and tweets about it, or maybe gets a few hits on You-Tube.