NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton deserves kudos for reacting promptly and appropriately to the video.

The New York Post reports:

The NYPD detective who was caught on video chewing out an Uber driver has been stripped of his shield and gun, and will be placed on modified duty, Police officials said. Detective Patrick Cherry has been removed from the department’s elite Joint Terrorism Task Force and will be doing desk duty until he is officially transferred out of the prestigious division. “No good cop should watch that video without a wince,” Commissioner Bill Bratton said at a Wednesday press conference. “Because all good cops know that officer just made their jobs a little bit harder.” “In that kind of encounter, anger like that is unacceptable,” Bratton continued. “In any encounter, discourtesy and obscene language like that is unacceptable. “That officer’s behavior reflected poorly on everyone who wears our uniform.”

Michael J. Palladino, the President of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, made this statement:

I am not trying to minimize the significance of what occurred. I am simply pointing out that cops are just like everyone else. They have families, friends, and other things going on in their lives, too, that may affect their behavior at times. There is no disputing that we are held to a higher standard and that is why this incident is so newsworthy. Detective Cherry is a person of good character and an excellent Detective. He really should not be judged by one isolated incident.

It is possible that Detective Cherry is a person of good character and an excellent detective who behaved anomalously in this situation. But there are significant flaws in that defense of him. All of us certainly have families, friends, and bad days. And all of us do things we shouldn't sometimes. But even on our worst days, very few of have confronted, detained, or abused a fellow motorist who angered us in traffic, or lambasted an immigrant for minutes on end over his driving, because most of us possess neither the power nor the sense of entitlement necessary to act that way.

And it is false that police officers are "held to a higher standard."

This incident is illustrative. If the Uber driver had been recorded on a cell phone video going up to the window of a car that honked at him in traffic, smacking the door, and verbally abusing and intimidating another driver, he would obviously be fired. There's just no question. Having an average rating of three out of five stars from fares is enough to get an Uber driver removed from the job!

I wouldn't necessarily fire a police officer over a single incident like this one, depending on his work history, but make no mistake that the cop will be held to a lower standard here.

As the blog Photography Is Not A Crime put it, "displaying unprofessionalism is not a fireable offense as it would be in most any other job dealing with the public." Under union rules, after the police officer is afforded multiple layers of due process, the maximum penalty he'll face is a 30 day suspension. So no, Mr. Palladino, policemen aren't "just like everyone else."