Organized Crime

 

By Rick Boettger

 

Who will win the war of truth about the death of Charles Eimers at the hands of the Key West Police Department last Thanksgiving? The facts are rarely so clear as they are in this case: A video shows Eimers stop on the beach, put his hands in the air, and lie down, as instructed by police, who then swarm over him, and he dies. There are, of course, many details, but the deeper you look, the worse it appears for our police.

Defending the KWPD are the department themselves; their supposed investigators, fellow officers in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement; the City Commissioners; the Civilian Review Board; and the majority of the citizenry. Questioning the KWPD are a fraction of the media and one part of our judicial system.

The main defender is the FDLE. All of the other defenders rely first on waiting for the FDLE investigation to be over. It has been six months of no comment or even the release of the final medical report. The FDLE has made no attempt to interview critical witnesses. Understand the FDLE is composed of fellow cops. I can find no record of their charging a Florida officer with an illegal shooting. Ever.

A local parallel would be if Randy Acevedo had been assigned to investigate his wife Monique’s theft of over $400,000 from the school district. Absurd? No. In fact, the head of the FDLE investigation is the ex-wife of the KWPD captain in charge of the suspect officers, and mother of their child. Whenever fellow professionals investigate themselves, they sympathize and whitewash, whether they be military, lawyers, doctors, politicians, engineers, professors. They all stand by their own, hiding behind the supposed need of their insider expertise to understand details disinterested outsiders couldn’t follow.

So the FDLE is slow-walking their “investigation,” waiting for witnesses to move away and forget. The KWPD hasn’t docked anyone an hour’s pay, with life going on perfectly as usual, deferring any investigation until the sacred FDLE is done, whenever that may be. No surprises there.

Stranger is the inaction of our Civilian Review Board, which is supposed to be outsiders representing the people in overseeing the police. I submitted a formal request to the CRB over a month ago. They confirmed receipt, but have ignored it two months running. I did not ask them to comment on the specifics of the Eimers case, because I knew they would, of course, hide behind the “We need the facts from the FDLE” demurral.

No, I wanted them to recommend stopping the use of the “prone restraint” procedure that killed Eimers. I sent them my research, referenced, showing that the procedure causes between 50-200 deaths a year in the United States. Scientific studies of its dangers are readily available. But our CRB not only refuses to take a step to possibly prevent another cruel death, but refuses even to discuss my official complaint. Both their current and past directors have been retired law enforcement. That speaks for itself.

Our civic leaders, on the record, and the majority of our citizenry, by their silence, also want any suspicions of our police to just go away. Why? The ostrich avoiding danger, head in the sand. Or in social psychology, the “just world” hypothesis: We want to live in a world where the authorities are benevolent, so that is what we choose to believe.

Only one Key West weekly online publication has done any investigative journalism actually critical of police procedures. And our criminal investigators won’t touch it until, of course, the FDLE finishes its slow walk. Only a civil suit by Eimers’ survivors will critically seek the truth we can see in the video.

A coincidental confirmation of how We the People revere our police, right or wrong, occurred last week on the TV show Survivor. In it, people form alliances to vote each other off the island until the sole survivor wins a million bucks. Lying and backstabbing is normal procedure, but this season crowned the all-time king of lying. An active duty New Jersey cop won by repeatedly swearing to every single one of his allies on his wife, his daughter, his father’s grave, and even, to a fellow officer, on his badge, before then stabbing them in the back.

And the very people who trusted him, but whom he then blindsided, still voted him the million dollars. Even a fellow officer in his New Jersey department applauded his lying strategy. Sure, this was a game, but a serious game, and the way the winner lied so easily, so joyfully, so fluidly, it was clear that in his life and police work he did it all the time.

I desperately hope to write a future column apologizing to and praising the FDLE. Wake me when they’re done.

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