Quote:
Originally Posted by cneuy3
If he was running an illegal search and found an RAV 4 vehicle why would he call it in in that case either? He knows his phone call would be recorded by the dispatch. He could just write down the plate, drive to the station, check it himself, or run the plate in his own police cruiser, right? Furthermore if his intention was really to find the car illegally you'd think he'd have gathered this information on his own before doing the search. He has those resources right as an officer?
His statements in his testimony seemed reasonable to me. He was informed of a missing person and given a plate number and vehicle description and was calling to verify that the plate number was that of the missing person Theresa Halbach given to him by his source. That seems more logical to me than he ran an illegal search without knowing that information and then called into his dispatch to verify that he found the "correct" vehicle.
I don't claim to know what he was doing. I am just noting it was abnormal and not how such issues are handled. As noted a police officer in this thread had a hard time figuring out why he ever did it.
The issue is EVERYONE involved is corrupt, incompetent or both. At best this seems incompetent.
I am curious in 2016 if the SOP for dispatching missing persons descriptions calling every officer up on the phone so they can pencil it down? Even in a small jurisdiction like this it seems they would have better mechanisms to accurately disseminate such information. If they don't it just adds to the gross incompetence side of the ledger.
A RAV 4 is a fairly unique stylistic vehicle. It's not going to be confused with a Honda Accord, so again what difference does it make if he thinks he might have jotted it down wrong. No angle of this makes him look competent. Everything is not just an issue with corruption, incompetence eeks out of every single person working for those counties and the state. This is a big problem. We have a systemic issue with incompetent and lazy people who have zero oversight and answer to nobody. This is a perfect storm leading to people taking short cuts and doing other things to "put the bad guys away".
I can't think of a single person working for the state / counties in these cases who should not be fired for gross negligence / incompetence. However this problem seems to be prevalent across the entire state of Wisconsin. So there is nobody there to fix it.