Democracy Has Prevailed.

March 19, 2013

Coming full circle

You have to admit, there's a nice symmetry to it. Lil Mayor Luke's very first scandal involved the police and an Officer Frank Rende and now his administration is up to its eyeballs in police scandals and the latest involves an Officer Frank Rende.

Back in 2006, Ravenstahl had to drop his public safety director nomination of Dennis Regan. Part of the reason was because police Cmdr. Catherine McNeilly had sent an email to city officials warning them that "Mr. Regan undercut her effort to discipline city Detective Francis M. Rende, the brother of the woman with whom Mr. Regan shares a Point Breeze home." The article in the Post-Gazette back then noted that Rende had a "dozen accusations of conduct unbecoming an officer, verbal abuse and excessive force" including coming back to have sex with a woman who was depressed and very drunk when he had answered a domestic call earlier that day. Rende was also calling off sick for his police job to work side jobs and had been using another officer's password to pick up even more work. The other part was because Bill Peduto (and others) were hammering Regan as being completely unqualified for the position. Rende kept his job.

Now, some six and a half years later, Officer Frank Rende is in the news again, but this time, Ravenstahl is calling for him to be fired. Maybe it's because this time the incident is on tape. But the snark in me says that while Luke was able to look past officers beating down Jordan Miles and look past officers having incidents of domestic violence when promoting them, this is just a case of projection on Luke's part. After all, soon he may be the drunk white guy who's partied a little too hard on the South Side:

3 comments:

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

Officer Frank Rende will claim Officer safety and to have PTSD and the Police union will fight to keep him on the force like Daniel Harless


Officer Frank Rende was just following the cops' prime directive to make it home alive to his family.

EdHeath said...

HTTT - Once again you call for the death of all cops. You bring up an example from another city in another state and then imply that cops should not make it through their shifts alive to get home to their families.

And you do all this behind a pseudonym.

Obviously not all cops are good, and clearly some joined the cops just to bust heads. Add in that the only way to show results to the Sargent is to have arrests, whether the charge is any good or not, and it ends up that a fair amount of day to day police work is pretty futile. At the same time, to be a cop is to have a big target on your chest and your back, and I think most cops joined up to try to make their communities a better place (maybe that means helping people or maybe that means putting bad guys in jail). But they don't have many friends, so their union works hard to protect them. Maybe the union needs to develop a mechanism to ease bad cops out, but any FOP leader who suggested such a thing would probably get voted out by the rank and file at the nest election.

Maybe you could volunteer at the civilian review board, or just keep suggesting the solution is to kill cops.

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

Ed
Nice straw man why does believing bad cops should be punished using the same standard they apply to everyone else and not trusting the Police 100% mean I want to kill cops.

Once again you defend all bad cops and any officer misconduct.

That the excuse "cops should make it through their shifts alive to get home to their families." allows them to be able to violate anyone's rights without any consequences.

Here is a story when a police officer claims PTSD caused him to falsely arrest a Priest for videotaping police and "prepare and submit an allegedly false and misleading police report".

I believe that the Police civilian review board would rather have someone like you who believes that the Police can do no wrong including torturing of suspects to get false confessions.

BTW member of the Pittsburgh "Independent" Citizen Police Review Board are appointed you can't just volunteer.