Minnesota: Slap on Wrist for Cop Who Rammed Minivan Full of Kids
The Minnesota state trooper who rammed a slow-moving minivan on New Year’s Eve was given a slap on the wrist Wednesday. A written reprimand was placed in the personnel folder of Sergeant Carrie Rindal, mildly criticizing her for twice slamming her patrol car into the Toyota Sienna minivan belonging to Sam Salter, 40, who had been driving his two-, three- and six-year-old children home to Hudson, Wisconsin, just before midnight on Interstate 94 in St. Paul.
With rock music blaring in her squad car, Rindal activated her police lights and siren to chase after the man she claimed had made a lane change without signaling. Salter is seen in the video carefully pulling toward the right, turn signal on, within ten seconds. Salter, concerned for his family’s safety, did not want to pull into the snow-filled highway shoulder. He took less than a minute to reach the exit to Highway 61, driving slowly. Twenty-two seconds later, as Salter turned onto Burns Avenue away from the high-speed traffic, Rindal rammed the minivan from the side and then once more from behind.
“What are you doing?” Salter screamed as he exited the minivan. “I have three kids in my car and you just hit me.”
Rindal held the man at gunpoint while his children watched their father placed under arrest. Salter was incarcerated for the next 37 hours for making an illegal lane change and “eluding police.” His damaged car was also impounded and he was mailed a $130 ticket, even though prosecutors declined to charge him for any crime. A police review board investigating the incident supported Rindal on her choice of a gunpoint arrest and suggested there were places on the icy highway where Salter could have stopped. The board did not, however, believe Salter was fleeing police during the one minute and twenty second low-speed chase. For that, the state police chief labeled the entire incident “regrettable.”
Salter was not interested in pursuing a long legal battle, so he only asked for $9500 to cover his direct expenses from the incident, including legal bills, repair bills and the time lost with his family. The State Patrol accepted the settlement.
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Ask yourself, are we seeing an increase in Police Misconduct, or is the omnipresent video capacity catching more bad cops in the act? What happened before the video revolution? Isn't it obvious? Cops would lie about what happened in both their police reports and in court. Nobody believed the "suspect." Unbelievably, cops are so used to lying as a matter of course, they STILL, out of habit mostly, lie even when it contradicts the video evidence! The Constitution was designed to prevent a Police State. The modern day GOALof the cops is a police state. Policing, in tandem with unvarnished ambition and addiction to power, a thoroughly disreputeable and dishonorable profession. I am ashamed of my local police force.
What is truly remarkable, amazing and unprecedented is that the dumb cop was even disciplined. 99.999 percent of the time, there is little or no effective oversight of the police. The "thin blue line" energetically whitewashes and covers up even the most unbelievably egregious and criminal police misconduct. The political hacks that populate the bench in most states are anxious to prove their bonifides as unvarnished "holster sniffers," so eagerly allow even the most egregious and obvious cop perjury. Had there been no video, discipline would have never happened in the case in discussion. Had there not been video in Oakland, that cop would not have been prosecuted for murdering that guy (shooting him in the back while he was prone, face down!). He would have been completely protected by the usual uniform chorus of unanimous lies told by the other bystanding cops. This is why the Founders were so ruthless with tight constitutional restrictions on the Police: At best, cops are a barely tolerable yet necessary evil. They Constitution fairly oozes with hatred and contempt for the police. In fact, had the constitution been written today, the Founders probably would have made Police testimony inadmissable without video coroboration, required the Police to get a telephonic warrant from an impartial magistrate for a routine traffic stop, and would turn over in the graves at the military-style policing used to "combat" marijuana users.