Thursday, December 18, 2014

A Peace Officer Defies the "Blue Tribe": The Exile of Officer Cariol Horne


Not the only one: Chokeholds are illegal, but widely used by police anyway.



David Mack was dying of strangulation in front of his horrified teenage sons while nearly a dozen Buffalo Police Officers looked on with indifference. The man who was killing Mack, Gregory Kwiatowski, was a member of their privileged tribe. The other cops at the scene understood that their duty was to protect the assailant, rather than to aid the victim. 

“My father was laying there blue, I ain’t never seen him like that,” Wesley Mack later testified in court. “A lady cop went up to him and said, `Chill, Greg, you’re choking him,’ and she pulled his arm and he jumped up and popped her.”

“Get the hell off me, you black bitch!” snarled the uniformed embodiment of all that is good and decent, slugging the female officer in the face.

Mack had been arrested by Officer Anthony Porzio for “contempt of cop” after exchanging words with Officer Paul Sobkowiak, who had responded to a domestic disturbance report. A postal carrier told Sobkowiak that Mack had been withholding Social Security checks from his ex-girlfriend, who still received her mail at the address. 

Sobkowiak called for backup and a throng of officers converged on the home. Commanded to turn over the check, Mack went into his house and retrieved what he claimed was all of the mail he had received that day. After the cops accused him of concealing the check, Mack told them to leave him alone. Defiance of that kind from a Mundane is impermissible, of course, so Sobkowiak attacked Mack, as did Kwiatowski and every other officer on the scene. 

“Where one acts, all must follow,” is the unwritten but binding code of the Blue Tribe.
 
Officer Cariol Horne with attorneys.
Horne was among the cops who responded to an “officer in distress” call. She didn’t see the initial assault, but when she arrived at the address she helped drag Mack out of the house. Like all police officers, she had been programmed to follow the code of the Blue Tribe without hesitation. Kwiatowski’s conduct caused Horne’s resilient human decency to rebel and overcome that programming.

Once Mack had been handcuffed, Kwiatowski decided to inflict summary punishment for the impermissible act of resisting arrest, beating the prone and helpless 59-year-old man. The assault quickly escalated to attempted murder as Kwiatowski turned Mack around and sank a chokehold. 

There were, once again, nearly a dozen police officers on the scene. Horne – a tiny black woman who was roughly half Kwiatowski’s size -- was the only one who assumed the role of peace officer by intervening to prevent the murder of an innocent man. The use of lethal force would have been justified, but Horne – once again acting as a peace officer – used proportionate force, even though in doing so she exposed herself to risk. 

“I thought whatever happened in the house [Kwiatokski] was still upset about so when he didn’t stop choking him I just grabbed his arm from around Neal’s neck,” Horne recalled in a recent television interview. “He comes up and punches me in the face and I had to have my bridge replaced.” 

Mack, who survived the assault, was hit with the predictable assortment of cover charges, which were just as predictably dismissed. Cariol Horne was charged with “obstruction” for supposedly “jumping on Officer Kwiatowski’s back and/or striking him.” 


Kwiatowski himself admitted that although Horne intervened, “she never got on top of me.” The charge filed against her was as spurious as those lodged against Mack, and they served precisely the same purpose – namely, providing pseudo-legal cover for an act of official retaliation. 

Horne, who eventually was fired as a result of the charge, was “obstructing” an attempted murder. She was upholding the law in the face of privileged lawlessness. Her experience uncannily echoes that of Regina Tasca, another veteran female officer who was purged from the force for “obstructing” criminal violence inflicted on a prone and helpless victim by a fellow cop, and that of Ramon Perez, who was punished by the Austin Police Department for refusing to carry out an unlawful order to use his Taser on a non-violent elderly suspect. 

Significantly, the Buffalo City Government waited until May 2008 to terminate Horne. At the time she was two months from retirement, which means that she lost her pension. Among the “charges” upheld against Horne was the accusation that she had impermissibly told her story to the media. 
 
Hero: Officer Tasca stops a beating.
Mack and his son Wesley, who was also arrested during the November 2006 police riot at their home, filed a civil suit against the police who assaulted and abducted them. A six-member jury ruled against them – five white jurors siding with the officers, the sole black panelist with the black plaintiffs. 

Kwiatowski filed a defamation suit against Horne, which he won because the former officer -- a single mother with young children to support – was too busy earning a living to appear in court. Horne found employment in the productive sector as a truck driver, an honorable profession that is considerably more dangerous that law enforcement. 


When he wasn’t seeking revenge in the courts, Kwiatowski earned a promotion to Lieutenant through the conduct Horne had attempted to stop. He was eventually allowed to retire – with a full pension – at age 46 after several other episodes of criminal violence, including one in which he assaulted an off-duty NFTA Officer. That attack, appropriately occurred at a restaurant following a police union dinner. The victim admonished some of his comrades for being loud, vulgar, and abusive, and warned that other patrons were capturing the event on their cell phones. This violated the unwritten rules of the Blue Tribe, and Kwiatowsky inflicted what he considered to be the appropriate punishment. 

Several months ago, Kwiatowski and three current members of the Buffalo PD were indicted by a federal grand jury for civil rights violations allegedly committed in 2009. Even apart from his subsidized retirement, Kwiatowski remains a burden on Buffalo’s tax victims. 

Renewed scrutiny of Kwiatowski’s behavior was prompted, in part, by the suspension of Buffalo PD Officer Robert Eloff last May. Eloff was put on paid vacation after the department’s internal affairs division began investigating his role in a near-fatal assault on an Air National Guardsman at Molly’s Pub, a bar where Eloff was paid $25 an hour to moonlight as a security guard. 
 
Officer Robert Eloff.
The victim, William Sager, suffered a traumatic brain injury after being pushed down a flight of stairs by the pub’s manager. Surveillance tape from the bar reportedly shows Eloff and the manager going into the room where the recording equipment is kept just shortly before the video went dark.  Rather than rendering aid to the victim, Eloff – in keeping with his training – handcuffed him in the interest of “officer safety.” A friend of the victim called 911 to report that they were being abused and harassed by Eloff and fellow Buffalo PD Officer Adam O’Shei, who was also working as a bouncer. 

It should be understood that Eloff didn’t take a second job out of financial necessity. The 39-year-old tax-consumer was paid $106,300 last year, of which nearly $23,000 was overtime awarded for appearing in court. Eloff has long been regarded as one of the Buffalo PD’s most “productive” officers on account of his propensity for making arrests in volume, which – as his compensation figures demonstrate – is a singularly lucrative racket. 


Eloff was also involved in the recent gang-beating of a man named Christopher Kozak, who was set upon by a thugscrum of at least a half-dozen Buffalo PD officers – and then left in a bloody heap on the sidewalk without being arrested or charged with an offense. 

Amid these accumulating incidents of criminal depravity, Horne has renewed her campaign for vindication – not merely for self-interested reasons, but also to protect the public from the entitled, costumed bullies who prowl their streets.

Destitute, but honest: Horne in private life.
“If the message they want to give is that an officer is going to be fired if they stop [abuse], then that’s the wrong message,” Horne observes.  Of course, that is precisely the intended message: A police officer who attempts to strangle a handcuffed and defenseless man can expect a promotion, but an officer who carries out her legal duty to prevent that murder can expect to be assaulted, criminally charged, and financially ruined.

The treatment endured by Cariol Horne provides some necessary context to the police murder of Eric Garner. Some authoritarian-minded commentators, seeking to defend that crime as a necessary vindication of “law” in the face of defiance, have sought to deflect the blame from Officer Daniel Pantaleo to his “black, female supervisor” – the latter description lacquered with facile irony by people desperate to define such issues in terms of racial collectivism. 

The officer who was an accessory to the murder of Eric Garner achieved that position because she had been faithful to what former LAPD Officer Mike Rothmiller calls “the code of the Blue Tribe: When one acted, all must follow.” 

Government law enforcement, as an institution, is defined by that ethic, which is why it cannot be reformed.



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Dum spiro, pugno!


9 comments:

Kent McManigal said...

If you are a good person you can't be a cop. If you are a cop and wish to be a good person, you have to quit that "job".

Maybe that offends you, but it is reality. Cops have become the most dangerous, and largest, criminal gang in America. They are completely funded by theft ("taxation") and spend almost all their time imposing counterfeit "laws" on the rest of us- "laws" which are in violation of Natural Law/Rightful Liberty. And they do it with aggression and brutality. A good person can't do that, and you can't do that and still be good or decent. Nope. If you do those things you are a disgusting tax junkie. A domestic enemy and a coward.

I'm glad Ms. Horne is a former cop- she has the chance to go straight now.

rkshanny said...

"honest"? An illegitimate enforcer for Caesar is not "honest" in the general sense. Maybe she was "honest" in this case when her sociopathy was replaced momentarily with some naive humanity, but that ain't sayin' much as far as I'm concerned. How many times has this sow done her "job" where her sociopathy won out over her "honesty", at our expense? Serves her right to be put through the same black & blue ringer the rest of us plebes get rendered by at the hands of her co-imperial boars. Maybe she will now become truly "honest" with herself and her State-victimized neighbors, now that she is "destitute" and has to earn a living at her own expense instead of ours! Nothin' like a lesson learned the hard way . . . long over due.

Anonymous said...

All pigs are Sociopaths! Watch the movie "The Experiment" if you don't have a sense of what happens in the minds of these pigs as they're given control. In that movie, after Forest Whitaker (who started out as a mild mannered geek living at his mommy's house) dominated someone, there is a scene where he looks down at his crotch (the camera pans down too) and he's standing there with a full erection. The c0cksu3kers actually get off on this $h1t. If you don't get the drop on then first, you're at the mercy of a sociopath. If they get the drop on you, you might wind up dead. Free Men & Women ought to fight back with equal or greater force. Kill them if necessary to fight for your freedom. Letting them just have their way with you and hoping the 'system' will vindicate you is hazardous to ones health. If we start k1lling them, and they start burying their own (the same way civilians are) they're not going to stop. Like a bully...he won't stop because you ask him nicely, you have to turn around and hammer fist that s.o.b in the nose to MAKE him stop! Wake up to what FREEDOM actually is people! We've all been indoctrinated soo soo much, most have forgotten what freedom is, let alone the fact that the price of freedom is blood, because those that would endeavor to take your freedom will never give it back to you. You must kill them and take it back. Sad, but based on human history, very true.

William N. Grigg said...

The system selects for sociopaths, and generally weeds out those who retain a residue of decency. This makes the behavior of Cariol Horne, Regina Tasca, and Ramon Perez all the more remarkable: Their conscience asserted itself with the same defiant strength displayed by a flower that somehow thrusts itself through a concrete sidewalk.

Their experiences likewise make it clear that the expression "good cop" is a functional synonym for "ex-cop" -- which is why, as I noted above, the system itself is not susceptible to reform.

Goodmenbetter said...

The ability to exercise moral decisions, contrary to department policy or the opinion called "law", when pay, privelage, power and pension are on the line, is astronomically rare in the constabulary. Power is as addictive as cocaine and registers the same effect in the brain. You will not find balanced minds in uniform.

In a Christmas vein, chief butterball temporarily trades itchy trigger finger for pen over a political cartoon indicating children's wish to Santa that he keep them safe from the porcine class (see link).

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20141211_Cartoon_of_kids_asking_Santa_to__quot_Keep_us_safe_from_the_police_quot__draws_ire.html

Labor Equals Zero said...

Will,

Love your Freedom Zealot podcasts, and of course, your columns on Pro Libertate.

I was wondering what it would take to form a Private enterprise of people who will show up at every police encounter for the purpose of preventing the police from inflicting pain or death or damage to property- and who must justify themselves on camera for the actions they wish to take.

Failing that, to be subdued if necessary, under Citizens Arrest with charges of police harassment.

If there is indeed a problem to be resolved with the people who are not cops at the scene, and if they require citizens arrest- then do that too- but at least they will be unmolested and alive.

Of course, if circumstances legitimately warrant necessary force, the Police should be prevented from exercising it- and only the peaceful people should carry out the necessary force. The police should be held at bay as mere spectators.

All Tax Feeders are illegitimate.

Anonymous said...

Woman files $30million lawsuit against New York police who 'caused son's death by not arresting him for drunk driving'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2878075/New-York-woman-sues-police-not-arresting-son.html#ixzz3MRZB3Tbc
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Anonymous said...

One outcome when the justice system fails to protect mundanes from the police:

http://nypost.com/2014/12/20/2-nypd-cops-shot-execution-style-in-brooklyn/

InalienableWrights said...

Don't get the idea that Cariol Horne is a good cop. There is no such thing. All she did was manage to do the right thing for a change, rather than her usual daily task of violating citizens rights.