The armed and masked off-duty Phoenix, Arizona, cop said he wanted to get kids at a high school ICE protest arrested.

A police official in Arizona has been placed on administrative leave after showing up armed to a student-led protest and provoking an altercation that led to the arrest of a teenage girl. The officer told fellow police who arrived on the scene that he attended the students’ immigration rights protest with the intent of acting as an agent provocateur, according to a news report.

Dusten Mullen, a sergeant with the Phoenix Police Department, has been suspended with pay pending an internal review of his conduct at a protest at Hamilton High School in Chandler, Arizona, on January 30, according to Phoenix Police Chief Matthew Giordano.

“As law enforcement professionals, we are held to higher standards of conduct — both in and out of uniform,” Giordano said. “When we fall short, we must be accountable, and we will not tolerate actions which undermine the trust the community has placed in the Department.”

Fox 10 Phoenix, the outlet to first identify Mullen, reported that Mullen told Chandler Police Department officers on the scene that he was there in the hopes of getting a rise out of the kids that would then allow the local cops to cuff them.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    5 hours ago

    https://ny.prelawland.com/post/719662253773832192/too-smart-for-the-job-jordan-v-the-city-of-new

    Jordan had applied for a job as a police officer in the city of New London, Connecticut. However, he was denied an interview because he scored too high on a written examination.

    …

    The city had introduced this policy because they felt that those that scored high on this examination were more likely to leave a police officer position sooner. To reduce costs associated with job turnover, training, and hiring, the city created this upper cut-off score. Jordan had scored a 33, which meant he was overqualified for the position.[2] As a result, Jordan argued that this policy was a form of discrimination based on his intellect.

    …

    The court found that even though there was no strong statistical correlation between high test scores and job dissatisfaction, it was sufficient that the city believed that there was such a correlation based on the material provided by the test maker.

    …

    The court found that the policy had a rational basis that served the legitimate government purpose of reducing job turnover and associated hiring and training costs.

    So quite literally:

    Cops don’t hire smart people because they think smart people probably wouldn’t like the job.

    AND

    Cops are allowed to have internal policies that are found by the court to not actually be rational or backed by any actual empirical data, they simply have to claim that they thought they were rational, and this essentially makes them legally ‘rational’.

    This is essentially a legal carve out for corruption and abuse of power, that is routinely exploited by police departments, to hire outside contractors and consultants to come up with dubious and nonsensical policies and training and such for them… there functionally is no mechanism for scrutinizing this, unless they’re just literally doing financial fraud or money laundering.

    Like half the country still uses polygraphs, even though there is an entire body of scientific knowledge that shows them to be approximately as legitimate and effectacious as chiropracty.

    See also all the spying devices and malware they use, that they certainly do not technically understand, and routinely employ and very often either don’t even bother to legally justify, and very often make dubious legal arguments as to their validity.

    Cops extremely literally exist in an extremely entitled and defferential legal status than every one else, our legal system is built upon deepthroating the boot.