QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From the Houston Chronicle:

Two Harris deputies arrested, one fired

Eleazar Gongora, Jr., was charged with continuous sexual abuse of a child, a felony. He was taken into custody by sheriff's deputies, the Gulf Coast Violent Offenders and Fugitive Task Force.

And

Also on Friday, another deputy was arrested after internal affairs investigators accused him of falsifying records of his whereabouts while at work.

Jimmy W. George, 38, was later charged with felony tampering with a government record.

More here.

I haven't done one of these police corruption posts in a while. To be honest, I've gotten bored with them. On the other hand, that's kind of terrifying. That is, you find stories like this everyday, everywhere. I could devote an entire blog, with a daily output, to this stuff. It's so totally widespread that it's common. And that's why I'm bored with it. Why that's terrifying is because it represents, to me, anyway, the normalizing of police corruption and brutality as something with which we are comfortable. I mean, after all, it does happen all the time.

But the above linked story caught my eye because it's about two separate cases of police misbehavior in the same police department in the same freaking week. Full disclosure: the Harris County Sheriff's Department once illegally entered my apartment years ago with their guns drawn in search of a car thief who they had lost some five or six hours earlier--indeed, they illegally entered every apartment on the property for the same reason. That's professionalism. And by "professionalism," I mean "amateur hour."

My older brother, a conservative, has dismissed my assertions that we have a massive policing problem in this country by quickly noting that we have a lot of police, and that policemen are human beings, and human beings often do bad things--that is, this is to be expected and nothing can be done about it because being bad is human nature.

But shouldn't we hold the guardians of the law to a higher standard? Especially when so many cops appear to be breaking the law everyday, all the time? Frankly, I've come to believe that there is something embedded in the very culture of American policing itself that stinks to high heaven. And if we just shrug it off as human nature, without exerting any effort to see if something might be causing people who ought to be America's finest to be much less than that, then we're accepting police corruption and brutality as something normal and natural.

And I refuse to do that.

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