Maybe we all need to be wearing body cameras

Maybe we all need to be wearing body cameras

On November 14, 2014, Kelvin Kirkpatrick, an African-American Metro bus driver with over 20 years of experience in Seattle, requested that sheriff's officers remove sleeping homeless men from his bus , per company policy. The officers weren't helpful and even lied to Kirkpatrick about why they weren't being helpful. He got back on his bus and got back to work.

Little did he know that two of the officers involved would flat out lie about the entire encounter in a report that they completed, stating that he dropped f-bombs and berated them. The thing is, that never happened—and a body camera, worn by the bus driver himself, captured the entire ordeal as you can see below the fold.



The firings resulted from an investigation into a complaint filed by King County Sheriff’s Office Sergeant Lou Caballero after an early morning argument on Nov. 14 between him and driver Kelvin Kirkpatrick in downtown Seattle, internal Sheriff’s Office documents showed. During the argument, Kirkpatrick, a 20-year transit veteran, criticized Caballero and his deputies for not removing non-paying “sleepers” from his bus. Caballero said Kirkpatrick yelled at him: “You got three fucking deputies out here that don’t do nothing.” Another deputy, Amy Shoblom, attested to that in a witness statement.

Both officers have now been fired, but it shows you the frightening ease with which officers will not only make shit up, but back each other up on the fiction.

America. 2015.