It Could Happen Here - Celebrating National Police Week

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Molly, Mia, and Shereen celebrate National Police Week by deconstructing some of the myths about line of duty deaths and sharing the stories of several of the officers being honored this week.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off

our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami?

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Eliane Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to It Could Happen Here. I am once again your occasional host, Molly Conger. Joining me today for a very special episode are my friends and yours, Shireen and Mia. So Shireen, Mia, we're here today to honor and reflect upon a very somber and important holiday. It is May 15th as we are recording this today. And today is actually recognized the world over as Nakba Day, a day to remember the first Nakba, the founding of the state of Israel and the forced displacement of

the Palestinian people. And this year, as a new Nakba continues, as the genocide is being committed against the Palestinian people, it's more important than ever to remember that these atrocities did not start last year. But that isn't the Memorial Day I invited you here to talk about. Here in the United States, the holiday officially on the books today is not Nakba Day. It is National Peace Officers Memorial Day. In 1962, President Kennedy signed a proclamation establishing May 15th as National Peace Officers Memorial Day, and the week it falls within as National Police Week. It's an entire week to honor and commemorate the brave boys in blue who've lost their lives in the line of duty. And I can't think of a better way to spend this

afternoon with both of you than to talk about how this holiday is celebrated and to share some of these incredible stories of courage and sacrifice. So one of the most frequently cited sources during Police Week and year-round when you're talking about the mortality rate of police officers is a website called the Officer Down Memorial page. I highly encourage you to visit it, make an account, browse the pages. The website is run by a non-profit organization by the same name and has had tax-exempt status since 2000. According to their IRS Form 990s, the tax form that tax-exempt non-profits have to file annually. They're pulling in around $750,000 a year, a third of which goes directly toward executive compensation. And why shouldn't someone make a quarter of a million dollars annually to do such important work? Public records show the website's founder, Chris Cosgriff, is a police officer himself in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Available salary data from 2018 shows him making a policeman salary of about $69,000. According to his LinkedIn page, Cosgriff still works for the Fairfax County Police Department as a recruiting supervisor. The Officer Down Memorial page tax documents show he paid himself a paltry $24,500 in 2023 as the executive director of the nonprofit, though they list key employee compensation at an expense of $250,000 that year, with no indication of who is being paid that remaining $225,000 or what that person's position is. When the organization received a $30,000 PPP loan in 2020, they indicated on their loan documents that there were five employees at

the organization. I'm not an accountant, so I won't hazard any kind of guesses here, but I am having trouble making sense of that 2020 Form 990, which lists five company officers by name, and only Cosgriff is drawing a salary. He paid himself $50,000 that year. So that same document from 2020 shows that the organization had expenses of $200,000 for compensation of officers, but it doesn't say where that remaining $150,000 went. Hmm. I wonder. Maybe they have a secret employee that they're not counting. His son, his wife, his other wife.

his son, his wife, his other wife. The website indicates that donations to the nonprofit go towards maintaining the website, making posts on their Facebook, maintaining the site's companion mobile app, and historic research, claiming that their staff, again, those five people, have uncovered records of over 2,000 fallen officers that otherwise would have been forgotten to time.

The site has memorial pages for officers who died as far back as 1776 so it's as old as america that's that's that's not real it's not we didn't actually really have what is considered modern policing back then so they're really kind of stretching definitions are they including like uh people that went after slaves? Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, they are. Pax collectors. Yes. All of these. We were stretching yikes.

That's a lot. I don't know if we want to go that far back, but, I mean, do you? Donations also help fund their No Parole for Cop Killers program, which tracks the cases of the people they call convicted cop killers and flood local parole boards with letters advocating against release. The donation page claims to have sent out over 10,000 such letters in the last six months alone. They also have a merch page where you can buy a lovely trio of thin blue line Christmas ornaments in a gift box for the low, reasonable price of $60.

Jesus Christ. Out of all the things I thought you were going to say, I did not think you were going to say Christmas ornaments. Oh, yeah. Beautiful, beautiful memorial ornaments. You can get them customized. Wow. The site lists information about American law enforcement officers,

prison employees, and police dogs who have lost their lives in the line of duty. Kind of. See, while the website is the source cited in every local news puff piece when May 15th rolls around every year, putting their version of the numbers in the headlines, the organization's stats don't match those in the FBI's annual report on the subject, an official annual report called the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted,

or LEOCA, report. The data used by the FBI is collected as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting System. If you take just a minute to look at the officer down memorial page's annual data, the reason for this mismatch is immediately clear. They're padding their numbers by including deaths by natural causes, on-duty deaths due to accidents or incidents unrelated to the officer's duties, and they're including law enforcement adjacent personnel that the FBI does not consider to be law enforcement deaths in their reporting. The FBI's Leoka report has really clear criteria for inclusion. To be considered a law enforcement line of duty death, the deceased must have been a duly sworn law enforcement officer acting in

their official capacity at the time of their death. So they have to be a real cop, somebody who carries a badge and a gun and has full arrest powers. And the FBI specifically excludes death by natural causes like heart attacks or COVID, deaths that occurred on duty, but quote, attributed to their own personal situation, such as domestic violence, neighbor conflict, et cetera, which like that they have to list that by name. If you died doing a domestic violence in uniform that doesn't count how often is that happening yeah i hope people who killed him are getting parole like good god right like if your wife kills you while you're beating her but you're on the clock the fbi says no dice they also specifically note that they do not include corrections officers

bureau of prisons officers bailiffs judges probation and parole officers, or U.S. attorneys and assistant U.S. attorneys. So just cops, not the people who sort of work in the industry around them but are not cops. Not people that basically are cops, like actual cops. Actual cops. And the FBI is really aware, clearly, that the numbers on the ODMP get cited more often than their own, because the FBI's Crime Data Explorer page offers this weaselly little caveat. Quote, the FBI's LEOCA program is one of a number of entities that report information concerning line-of-duty deaths and or assaults of law enforcement officers in the United States.

Each organization has its own purpose and may use different methods to collect and report information or focus on somewhat different aspects of these important topics. Therefore, care should be taken not to compare Leoka data to data provided by other entities, such as the Officer Down memorial page. So they're specifically saying, we know these numbers don't match. We know these numbers don't match because a few years ago, we gave them a few hundred thousand dollars in grant money to make numbers that are fake. Wow. Incredible. Wow. So the ODMP is padding out their numbers with off-duty accidents, prison guards, parking lot heart attacks, and COVID deaths. The database includes nearly 900 COVID deaths, causing massive statistical anomalies in their

2020, 2021, and 2022 data. They include officers who died of natural causes years after sustaining minor on-the-job injuries, which, you know, if you're involved in a civil lawsuit after the death of a loved one, you could maybe argue that this was sort of a, you know, a downhill kind of thing. If you're trying to get a settlement from the state, maybe you could say that, you know, the injury sustained contributed to the death. But that's, you can't tell me that slipping in the parking lot and then dying six years later is an experience unique to the dangers of law enforcement. A district attorney who flipped his car after hitting a log that fell off a truck on the highway on a Friday night is not a law enforcement line of duty death. Because not only was that not a cop, it was a single car accident.

And when DeSoto County Search and Rescue Director, Deputy William Nichols, went on a beach vacation and took his family into the ocean despite red flag riptide hazard condition warnings, he lost his life trying to rescue his son. And that's very sad, but drowning on vacation is not a line of duty death.

When Indiana Department of Natural Resources Sergeant Ed Bowman and his friend drowned in the middle of a frozen lake while ice fishing, that wasn't a line of duty death. It's just a sad accident while dudes were hanging out. These people, they really should have a bad time around water. This is a consistent thing. Cops, Don't float. There is a shocking number of drowning deaths where the cop just like the second his feet got wet, he just disappeared. Don't get them wet. It's not a gremlin situation.

We have to include swimming in the cop test, right? I don't know i mean these people barely know how to point their guns like expecting them to be able to swim is this the standards are that that's a bit too high of a standard for them well i mean to be fair most of these deaths are single car accidents uh one guy died after t-boning a school bus um the children were fine the children were oh thank god okay thank god oh and so rather than a detailed statistical analysis relying on uniformly The children were fine. The children were fine. Oh, thank God. Okay. Thank God. Wow. And so rather than a detailed statistical analysis relying on uniformly reported official data, the ODMP relies on user-submitted content.

So people are submitting things and then- This is like Wikipedia. Yeah. Wikipedia for bootlickers. No. No thanks. But when National Police Week rolls around, it's their inflated numbers in every infographic, not the FBI's methodologically consistent data. And if I'm being generous, you know, you could write that off on the ease of access to the

data on ODMP. It's very user-friendly. It shows you a little picture and a bio of each officer. It's very easy to use. You can search by year, agency, cause of death, state, or an officer's name. You can search by year, agency, cause of death, state, or an officer's name. It's not a wall of small text with little data tables and links to zip files of more data tables. The FBI's report is ugly and it's uncompelling and it's sort of overwhelming to navigate if that's not something you are interested in doing.

So don't be too hard on the 22-year-old news anchor scrambling to put something on the screen at six o'clock. The Officer Down Memorial page makes it a matter of a few easy clicks for your local news anchor to find a handful of local interest stories to run on May 15th. But the people who run the website know exactly what they're doing, and it's an intentional ideological project to perpetuate the myth of the courageous, noble policeman doing America's most dangerous and thankless job, a job that is uniquely and outlandishly perilous, standing apart from any other profession. And that, that's not true. That's not true. And for this, I take you to another government agency's annual reports, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Oh, I love this report. This is the best one. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has consistently reported, I'm talking, you know, for the last 30 years, consistently since the 90s, a fatal workplace injury rate for police officers of around 14 per 100,000 full-time equivalent employees. You know, it varies year to year, but it's consistently a little under 14 per 100,000.

And of course, yes, that is higher than the national average for all labor categories. So for all workers in the U.S., the workplace fatality rate is about 3.7 per hundred thousand. So the cops are dying at a rate of four times higher than the average worker. And of course, it's more dangerous if your job requires driving all day. Most of these cops die in car accidents. Or if your job involves mishandling a firearm every day, of course it's more dangerous to do that than it is to do data entry or be a cashier. I mean, obviously we do not have a high mortality rate for the average desk job. But while it is more dangerous than being a receptionist, policing doesn't even crack the top 10 for most dangerous professions. Loggers are seven times more likely

to die on the job. Roofers are more than four times more likely than a cop to die due to a workplace incident. Being a fisherman is more than three and a half times more dangerous than being a cop. General construction work is more than three times more dangerous than police work. Delivery drivers are more than twice as likely to die at work than a cop. It is more dangerous to be a day laborer on a farm picking fruit or to drive a garbage truck. Being a cop has a similar level of risk of death by workplace incident as being a groundskeeper. So it is about as safe as being the guy that cuts the grass at the park. Yeah. And I think there's a real issue with labor reporting for the category of farm worker because whenever you see data that says farm worker, that can either mean someone who's actually a farm worker or it can mean a guy who sits in an air-conditioned office every day. labor statistics is not very good at actually sifting those out because there's been a sustained effort by like farm owners to to make to make sure this data is like as non-transparent as possible

so i am i will say i am fairly confident i cannot say this is nasty fact i am fairly confident that farming is actually significantly more dangerous than the real labor statistics says so like it is so much more dangerous to like pick your food than it is to be a cop and because i think for a lot of industries there is a lot of incentive to under report workplace accidents i think policing is one of the only industries where they are incentivized to over report accidents right so the data is i mean even for as skewed as the data may be at the point of entry it's still a lot safer to be a cop than it is to drive a truck and this is with the numbers of them like falling into a puddle

right well so i think the the bureau of labor statistics is probably using something closer to the fbi numbers okay which is still i mean you know on the other hand cops are the biggest babies about this in the entire world because they get paid leave if every time you had a boo-boo at work you could just go home for a week you'd do it too yeah but also i mean just like in the media it's like these people never shut up about how dangerous their job is and it's like your your job is more safe than like most of the actual hard jobs people work. Like, please shut up. Oh, my God. And the one thing that all those jobs have in common, aside from requiring you to be braver, smarter and stronger than a cop.

They don't typically come with platinum level health care, paid leave for minor boo-boos, state subsidized life insurance, a pension, a discount at the coffee shop, and a license to kill. Do you know what else has a license to kill? I was going to say, before we get into really honoring our boys on this special day, I think we should take a quick ad break that is hopefully not an ad for the Washington State Patrol. not an ad for the Washington State Patrol. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at

the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Gianna Pardenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian

Toot, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not.

Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails.

I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they don't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Okay, and with all that background out of the way, would you care to join me in commemorating some of the officers our nation is honoring this National Police Week? This is what I came here for.

I'm so excited. Now, before we get into the handful I picked out for us today, I want to be really clear for the boys over at the Officer Down Memorial page, because their website specifically prohibits the use of their content for commercial purposes. So I will say, I found these names on their website, but I don't trust their methodology enough to take their content at face value, so I wouldn't use it as a source anyway, even if I were allowed to do that. So for each of these vignettes, I pulled original contemporaneous local reporting on the incidents, and in some cases, actual court records. So, you can't get me. In 2010, St. Joseph, Missouri, police officer Dan Decry was participating in a training exercise.

During a break, he and another officer put down the training weapons they'd been using, which were loaded with something called simunition, so simulated ammunition. It's not real bullets. It's a plastic, non-lethal object that goes in the gun. Before leaving the training facility, which was a recently closed elementary school, to walk to a nearby convenience store to get a soda, the officers put down their training weapons and holstered their duty weapons. So to walk down the street to get to the 7-Eleven, they needed their real guns. So they put their real guns back on in case they encountered any emergency situations. Yeah.

In case, you know, in case they saw it, we'll get to a dog. So they holstered their duty weapons upon returning after their break drinks in hand officer decry asked his colleague officer jason strong to shoot him with a simunition round because he wanted to know what it would feel like oh my gosh that's just a beautiful desire you know just curious he's just a beautiful desire. You know? Just curious. He's just curious, you know? Yeah. Who would it be? Having a good day?

Who would it be curious? And so Officer Strong drew his weapon and shot Officer D'Cry in the back. Oh, man. I guess they both forgot that they put their real guns back on and not their training weapon. So I don't know if you ever, you probably know this, but if it's not a real gun, if it has fake bullets in it, if it is a training object, it has an orange tip.

I was going to ask that. I was going to ask, it can't look identical to a real gun. They're easily visually distinguishable for an important reason. And I guess he didn't look. So he pulled it out and shot him in the back and Officer Decry died later that day.

Wow. Incredible. Wow, wow, wow, wow. Later reporting on the incident indicates the department did say they were going to revise some of their policies regarding standard procedure for checking weapons in and out at training exercises.

So you have to check your weapon in when you get your toy gun and then you check it back out. They did not do that previously, but they revised those procedures and declined to comment further. The officer who killed Dan Ducry was not charged and remained with the department. Officer Ducry's family received a settlement of $376,000 from the city of St. Joseph. Again, settlement money does not come from police departments. It comes from the municipality. It comes from just the taxpayers. It does not affect the police's budget to do this.

That enrages me. You know, to give credit to that guy, though, actually hitting your cop, hitting their target on the first shot is pretty remarkable. That is a shooting the guy in the back on the first try is a pretty remarkable feat of cop marksmanship. So he might have been aiming for his knee, though. That's true. We don't know he was aiming for the back. It's just remarkable. I just want to know what it would feel like.

I wonder how close he was, too. He must have been pretty close. Yeah, I imagine they were sort of at conversational distance. That's insane. That is just, I cannot. Wow. Wow, wow wow wow our next story of a cop who should not have gotten wet it's not actually even about a cop in 2007 david polling drowned in the ohio river polling who's 32 at the time had previously been employed as a police officer with the gallipolis police department and at a different time as a sheriff's deputy with the Gallia County Sheriff's Office.

So by 32, he's been both a police officer and a sheriff's deputy, but he has neither of those things anymore. In 2007, he was working as a parole officer. In the reporting from the time, it's not actually clear why he was present, but he was nearby when a police officer stopped a pedestrian on the sidewalk and frisked him because he suspected this man may have just come out of a house where he believed drug deals were being conducted. So he's doing a stop and frisk on a guy minding his business. The man was not charged with a drug offense when this was all over, so I guess they didn't find drugs. But during the encounter, the man bolted. And Poling, who again, not a cop,

just a guy who's nearby, chased after him. The man jumped into the Ohio River and Poling jumped in after him. The suspect, Joseph Harris, made it quickly to a small island in the middle of the river. But Poling, immediately after hitting the water, sank and disappeared.

No, he did not. It took hours for divers to recover his body. When you said they didn't float, that wasn't a joke. No, he just disappeared. Like, the second he hit the water, he was just gone. I can't, that is just comical. I can't believe that's real. Like, did he not, did he know he couldn't swim?

Did he know he couldn't swim did he know he couldn't float like why are you stuck down to the bottom it's it's so good too because it's like you know you could attribute this to just purely like the first story of a drowning where it's like okay the cop clearly went into a situation he shouldn't have been in because he's a cop and doesn't think about oh wait the waves are gonna kill me but like no clearly this river was swimmable the other guy made it the other guy was fine well the other guy was fine until they charged him with manslaughter and he did four years in jail oh but he was but wait this is the guy that didn't have wasn't charged with drugs but was charged with manslaughter kind of with manslaughter because the other guy jumped in. Wait, he... For manslaughter

for the cop that sunk? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. But, like, some guy who's not even a cop is just chasing you. That's kind of on him.

Yeah. That he was convicted of manslaughter. That is... I hate that. But also, can you just imagine just this cop, like,

Mario jumping into, like, a river and just completely just,, like the video game sound at the bottom. And you do have to wonder how he had worked for two different police agencies and then didn't work for either of any more by the age of 32. I did. I did a little looking. I couldn't find anything about that, but it's an unusual career trajectory. Yeah. Yeah, it's like he's getting bounced down to lower leagues every time.

It's like, how do you that? You're a cop. How do you screw that up? Right, it would seem that he wasn't a cop anymore because he wasn't allowed to be a cop anymore. Yeah. And now this third one is the one that I had in mind when I first started writing this episode. And it's really just on its surface, kind of the perfect encapsulation of this foolish project, right? It's got a guy getting shot in the crotch. It's got a cop trying to kill a dog.

It's got a dirty cop. It's got a cop staying on the force after a string of expensive mishaps. This is just policing. But when I started looking for primary sources about this incident, it actually just kept getting weirder. And now I'm kind of down a new rabbit hole. I've got some requests out for more documents. Like, I'm going to figure this out. Something happened here. But before I tell you about Officer Henry McAleenan Jr., we'll take another quick ad break. Henry McAleenan Jr. We'll take another quick ad break. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology, I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, I'm Gianna Pardenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck.

You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions. Like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet

when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.

Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's the one with the green guy on it. All right. I hope you used that ad break time not only to think about products and services, but to reflect on the sacrifice of the parole officer who drowned in the Ohio River. On August 21st, 2000, Miami-Dade police officers Henry McAleenan Jr. and his partner, Itala Elias, responded to a request from a home alarm company

to check out what turned out to be a false alarm at a residential home in Southwest Miami. Arriving on the scene, they found no sign of a break-in, nothing unusual, and no one answered the front door. Normally, a cop would probably just leave. They don't really like working. They don't really like doing their jobs.

It's hard and it's boring and they have Candy Crush to play. Molly, it's dangerous. It's dangerous. It was a weekday afternoon in a nice neighborhood in Miami, but the home belonged to a retired Miami police detective. So they took, you know, they did the extra mile. to a retired Miami police detective. So they took, you know, they did the extra mile.

So after determining there was no sign of them breaking out front, no one answered the door, they went around the back of the house and entered the backyard where two Rottweilers, quote, came running at them, according to a South Florida Sun article

that week. McElhinney pulled out his expandable baton and began beating the dogs. They were really just doing their job in their own backyard yeah yeah like that that's the normal thing that happens when you walk towards a dog is it runs towards you're invading its territory you shouldn't be there you gotta figure a guy who has a home alarm system and two rottweilers like that is that dog's job yeah yeah yeah i keep thinking

about that uh who was it that that picture of of mike bloomberg when he was running in 2020 the word like she just grabs the dog's face oh yeah where it's like there's just something on the gate on a fundamental level like we co-evolved with this animal and like if you like cannot do the basic, this is a dog and your response is like, I'm going to grab his face or your response is I am going to beat this dog up with a baton. Like you, you have somehow fundamentally failed at like the process of being human. And also like if the dogs are immediately reacting to your presence in the yard and they were not previously reacting to anything, maybe you could assume there was no break-in. Maybe you could assume the dogs have it covered and you maybe don't break into the yard. But our boy Henry, he's beating these dogs with a stick. And I guess maybe

he was struggling. So his partner, Officer Elias, drew her service weapon and attempted to shoot the dogs as he is beating them. Wow. Now, we talked before about some problems with aiming, right? Cops don't have great marksmanship. When you're talking about a little complicated physical situation, right? They're sort of entangled. The dogs are small. The man is big. She shot him in the dick.

So he's beating these dogs. She shoots him in the groin. it doesn't say what happened to the dogs but it doesn't indicate she fired her service weapon multiple times so maybe she just shot him and then put it up he was airlifted to the hospital to undergo emergency groin surgery and he did survive oh officer McAleenan continued to serve at the Miami-Dade Police Department for another 16 years and he was still with the department

when he passed away in 2016 at the age of 66. His own obituary does not list a cause of death, only that his wife was at his bedside for 36 days before he passed. The first mention of McAleenan's passing being a line of duty death is in a National Police Week local news piece

the following year, which lists his cause of death as accidental gunfire. A year later in 2018, a Police Week story indicates that he was, quote, killed by gunfire on the date that he died in 2016. It's not until years later that you start to see claims that his cause of death was due to complications from the 16-year-old wound.

So it's not clear where that claim even originated, but he did die 16 years after being shot. And during those intervening 16 years, he was well enough to continue to serve on the force. I mean, do you know if the family went with that lie maybe they got money out of it i don't know i guess it's possible i mean there was what else what other motive is there other than i don't know i i see no indication that there was a wrongful death lawsuit after he died he did file a civil lawsuit in 2004 against the homeowner retired miami

detective jesus carames but that was dismissed and he didn't even recover attorney's fees he didn't get anything out of that wait so he he tried to hold up so he started beating two dogs with a baton and his partner shot him in the balls tried to hit the dog, and he tried to sue the guy whose house he broke into. I mean, this is incredible. If the homeowner hadn't been a retired, potentially dirty cop, I found some articles in the 80s alleging that this, so not alleging, in the 80s, this officer Jesus Caramez, who is deceased now, but was suspended briefly during an investigation into a ring of Miami officers who were trafficking cocaine. Of course. I don't know how that turned out. Well, I mean, probably went fine. Like, well, yeah, he didn't get fired because he was still in the force in 1997 when he shot a guy during a traffic stop. Wow. Jesus Christ. But no,

his lawsuit against the homeowner, the alarm company, and the woman who shot him. Oh my God. Did not succeed. Did not succeed. I mean, at least there's that. He loved being a cop so much getting his, did I say crotch or cop? He loved being a cop so much his crotch was shot off. And that didn't stop him.

That didn't stop him. I do have a request into the court clerk in miami to see if i can so the the documents are so old that they're not all uploaded on the court website but um i would like to see the original civil complaint because maybe it goes into more detail about sort of the severity of his injuries and the ways in which that he he truly suffered from this maybe that'll give us some more insight into how it killed him 16 years later so So hopefully, hopefully the clerk in Miami gets back to me with that because I do want to know what happened to the dogs. Oh yeah, that's all I really care about there. Now, the officer who shot McAleenan in the crotch, Atala Elias, had been on the force for about five years at the

time of the incident. In that time, she had wrecked her patrol car six times, In that time, she had wrecked her patrol car six times, injured her hand, slamming it in a car door, and racked up $50,000 in workman's comp and medical expense reimbursement after falling off a bicycle during a training exercise. Oh my God. As of 2022, Atala Elias is still an officer with the Miami-Dade Police Department,

earning $108,000 a year. Wow. That's just... I mean, I wonder how many more car accidents she's been in, if that was her record in five years. Wow, that's impressive. I am trying to think of

another job that you could keep after crashing your car six times on the job and shooting someone in the dick yeah john cops well cops cops have the kind of job security that was previously reserved for like workers in state owned industries in Maoist China. Like no one else has ever had this kind of job security before. And so I will end our stories here because Sophie will put one of us in the pit if the episodes keep coming out over an hour long. But there are an unbelievable number of stories of cops getting hurt doing shit they were not supposed to be doing a cop who died because he didn't know which antibiotics he was allergic to when he went to the hospital because he was messing around with an injured feral cat and got scratched a prison

guard who tripped in the rec yard and hit his head a shocking number of accidents at the shooting range or during training exercises they just want to know what it felt like they just want to know what it felt like including one very weird one where they were role-playing a scenario and so these were these were cops in the at the gaming commission so casino cops but during a training exercises during a training exercise they were role-playing a scenario where one of the cops was being attacked by an assailant and he was supposed to, you know, role play it out, right? They're pretending. This is pretend.

They're in a conference room. But he got scared and drew his real gun and really shot and really killed the director of the Mississippi Gaming Commission. Holy shit! Almost every cop death was completely preventable. They're careless and they're reckless and they're doing shit they should not be doing. They're counting normal wear and tear

like knee injuries and heart attacks as though these are noble deaths of martyrs. And it's all part of this ideological project of myth-making around American policing, right? Because you have to believe that this is a uniquely dangerous and frightening job that only the bravest boys can do because they're under so much risk. They have to react the way that they do. They have to react

with extreme violence. They have to shoot first and ask questions later because their job is just so dangerous, right? And I think it's interesting as we draw to a close to draw a comparison here, right? Because they react with great violence against us because of their fear of imaginary violence that they might face. So the FBI prepares this meticulous report every year with rigorous and mandatory data collection processes. So we have a comprehensive set of data about not just every cop who dies, but every cop who is assaulted on the job. The Leoka report includes on-the-job assaults and injuries. So we have a very clear idea of how much violence and how many accidents cops are exposed to, mostly in the form of single-car accidents. But we have the data.

There is no equivalent data for the kinds of violence police perpetrate on others. The FBI only started collecting information for the National Use of police perpetrate on others. The FBI only started collecting information for the National Use of Force Database in 2019, and participation in that data collection process remains optional. That's so late. 2019? That was like three years ago.

Four or five. I don't know what year it is. And it's voluntary. It's voluntary. So police departments do not have to tell anyone. They do not have to tell the federal government when they kill someone. They don't have to report that. So comprehensive data on police killings is something that only exists when newsrooms and nonprofits scrape the information together on their own. The Washington Post has a very thorough

police shooting database and nonprofit websites like Mapping Police Violence do their best to document each case, but even they admit they aren't capturing every fatal encounter with police. So while the FBI reports literally just a few dozen officers a year fall into the feloniously killed category in the Leoka report, so not the car accident one, so there's a few dozen actual killings of officers a year, we can only hope to know the names of the average of over 1,200 people who are killed each year by a cop. And that does kind of send a message about whose lives matter. So as you celebrate National Police Week this week, I guess you'll be hearing this on Friday if you listen to it the day it comes out, just take a moment to remember our

brave boys like Lonnie Burton, who tripped on a curb outside of the Wayland Baptist University police station and later died of complications. Or brave officers like Trooper Jack Holland, who died because he was allergic to yellow jackets. Or officers like Deputy Sheriff Joseph Baca, who was trying to tackle a suspect to the ground and fell into a bee's nest. It turns out he was allergic to bees. It's beautiful.

I should have asked you both your hometown so i could get you a local boy because one of my favorites is um patrolman billy toot billy toot um he was a jailer in richmond who died when two inmates were trying to escape after they obtained pistols that were smuggled into the jail inside of a baked turkey. That just sounds like a cartoon. Hell yeah. That worked. Good for them. Yeah, that's great.

It was in 1934. I don't think you can put guns inside of a turkey anymore. That's fair. I just have a whole turkey. And a security detector or something. But yes, I hope you're all having a safe and healthy police week and that you celebrate that by not encountering any policemen. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

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