A small Nebraska county is on the hook for a $28 million dollar judgment after 6 people were wrongly accused and falsely convicted of a murder. A murder the evidence should have told the investigating officers the 6 -- who spent nearly 70 years combined behind bars -- could not have committed.
Every conservative out there goes on and on about how government wastes money and we don't get a dollar's worth of service out of a dollar spent by or on government. Yet none of them ever seem to complain about the endless amount of money municipalities have been forced to spend after cops have shot and killed unarmed people in violation of their civil rights and locked up innocent people for years when they KNEW they had the wrong person behind bars. The total in just a handful of American cities in just a handful of years in this century is
OVER A BILLION DOLLARS.
It is shocking how poorly run many police departments are, and the resulting harm to our communities is a tragedy.
The arrest rate for murders in 50 of America's largest cities is under 50%. According to the FBI's data, fewer than 20% of property crimes result in the arrest of suspects. Keep in mind, these figures refer only to the clearance rate, which accounts for reported crimes where a suspect was arrested or charged. It doesn't mean that someone was actually brought to justice. And as we know, the cops make mistakes all the time, intentionally or out of incompetence, so some of those arrested, prosecuted or even convicted, end up being set free -- with a well deserved financial settlement in hand sometimes -- and the actual guilty person out there is rarely arrested or convicted.
This kind of incompetence would not be tolerated in most private businesses. And when inner city schools fail to teach the most disadvantaged among our young people, the hue and cry among republicans in other areas of most states is to drastically cut funding for big city public schools and throw that money down the charter school sink hole, or worse yet, find a way to transfer the tax dollars to private schools with neat little accounting tricks like vouchers. We starve our public schools, our public parks and our public roads of the funds they need to function at the same time we give billions of dollars to the victims of police incompetence.
Who knows though, maybe since those 6 folks in Gage County Nebraska were all white Midwesterners perhaps this will be a catalyst for change. Naaah, I didn't think so either.
