German Talis, Troofer Veracity, and a Lesson on Law Enforcement
It seems my post yesterday on the cowardly German “Gary” Talis has garnered quite a bit of attention. Sites on the left and right have been linking it and I’ve been getting comments all morning on the incident. No site has dished the venom, for or against Talis, like the site of the Troofer and all-around knuckehead Alex Jones. I won’t link to his Prison Planet site on general principle, but if you want to check it out, you might want to stock up on extra brain cells. You’re going to lose quite a few during your visit.
Here’s the bit of the post that addresses me.
“If you happen to live in New York City, I’d like you to remember the name of German Talis. If you happen to run across him, be sure to greet him heartily, then slap him right upside his cowardly little head,” snaps one blogger, before scoffing, “The most embarrassing part of the story for him is that the girl wasn’t even really injured. The guy can’t punch hard enough to hurt a girl in a wheelchair? What a pussy.”
Hey moron – the reason the girl wasn’t injured is because Talis never laid a finger on her, but he did get punched several times in the head by her Neo-Con father for his trouble, who also used his daughter’s wheelchair as a battering ram, according to eyewitnesses.
Yes, well, apparently it’s time to give the Troofers a quick lesson in law enforcement.
I’ve worked closely with police officers for most of my adult life – nearly 20 years at this point. I’ve picked up a thing or four about the law and about the restrictions under which cops generally work. What folks like the Prison Planet and his fellow Troofers miss is that there was very likely another important witness whose word trumps all of theirs.
That witness would be the police officer.
German Talis was arrested for a misdemeanor. That’s important because misdemeanor violations have slightly different rules than felonies. One of those rules, which can vary from state to state but pretty much remains true in principle, is that if a police officer locks someone up for a misdemeanor one of two things has to be true. Either the police officer witnesses the crime or someone else witnessed the crime and is willing to give a sworn witness statement. In a case where the witnesses’ stories conflict, the officer won’t arrest the suspect. Instead, the complainant will have to go to the local court commissioner or magistrate and swear out the complaint themselves.
Given that there were witnesses whose stories didn’t match those of the assaulted woman’s parents, the officer wouldn’t have hauled Talis in unless he saw him strike the girl himself. It is highly improbable that the officer would have taken on the burden of arresting Talis, going through all the paperwork involved and spending all that extra time in booking and processing him if he could have simply separated all the involved parties, moved them along their way, and sent everyone to the magistrate (or whoever does that in NYC) to swear out their complaints. Why? Police officers generally don’t like to do any more work than they have to, especially when that work is a couple hours of paperwork.
Does anyone really think that, if given the choice between dragging a whining simp into the station house and spending two hours listening to him prattle about the Constitution and the Twin Towers and sending everyone to swear out their own complaints so he could either get back to his patrols or head home to a nice cold drink, the officer would have chosen the arrest? Which one would you pick?
In fact, we can infer that the officer did see at least one assault. In the original report, the arrest came after officers “broke them up” which means that the officer was right there and saw at least the end of the confrontation. We also know that Talis was charged with resisting arrest, which means that he fought the officer. That runs directly counter to his sainted testimonial given later in the day on the radio.
I’d be very interested in seeing a copy of the arrest report to read what the officer saw and heard on the scene. I’d be willing to bet that the Troofer witnesses are, like they are about so many other things, horribly confused.
Other Posts of Interest:
Category: Moonbat Nonsense
Totally concur with all you say.
The problem with addressing "Troofers" and other such conspiracy playgroups is that nothing that is written or stated by the media will ever be taken as truth. It's all a pack of lies. Even if there was video, it would be doctored.
How many times does one have to look at the nutter video explaining how 9/11 was a big hoax before they shake their head in disgust. Has anyone of any credibility ever said a word on the subject. Well I mean besides Rosie O'Donnell.
Jimmie, you're doing a great job. Unfortunately, trying to convey the truth to these rockheads is like to trying to fill a cavity with candy.
From looking at your picture Jimmie, it looks like you ate the retarted girl
Resisting Arrest does not have anything to do with 'fighting' an arresting officer, it merely means he did not want to go and may have argued or made a PIA of himself, that constitutes resistance, it could be verbal, it could be token resistance to handcuffing, etc.
Warren, I have not, in nearly twenty years, seen someone charged with Resisting who didn't physically struggle against the arrest. I admit I've not seen every arrest made by the officers with whom I've worked, but I've seen dozens and dozens of folks charged with that, and none of them got it just for arguing.
If you make a PIA out of yourself in public, there's Disorderly Conduct to handle that. Resisting is for physical resistance.
Joey – Nice. Any chance those couple of brain cells might collide for a substantive response, or can I just chalk up another win over an idiot Troofer?
Someone pointed out on another blog somewhere else that Mrs.Bush and Jenna probably had Secret Service protection. Just guessing here, but it's also pretty probable that there is security tape as well.
Should be interesting…!
It is possible that the actual arrest is for assaulting the father; some of the accounts have talked about him having a split lip.
Cops lie all the time, especially New York cops.
ennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.
"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."
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Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.
During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.
A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.
For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.
Among them was Alexander Dunlop, who said he was arrested while going to pick up sushi.
Last week, he discovered that there were two versions of the same police tape: the one that was to be used as evidence in his trial had been edited at two spots, removing images that showed Mr. Dunlop behaving peacefully. When a volunteer film archivist found a more complete version of the tape and gave it to Mr. Dunlop's lawyer, prosecutors immediately dropped the charges and said that a technician had cut the material by mistake.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12vide…
And so do the people they arrest. In my experience, the people they arrest lie a lot more often.
Jim,
By omitting the rest of the story, and adding your comments, you'd think that there was an angry struggle between the police and the 1,806 arrested protesters that was dragged through the courts, and that only 401 protesters escaped conviction through the rescuing intervention of videotaped evidence that contradicted the police reports. In actuality the story mentions one lone police officer who testified incorrectly not "Cops" (plural) who lied.
In actuality it was merely a case of police officers using reasonable cause in arresting people when crowds started to become uncontrolled because of the acts of a much smaller number of persons engaging in disorderly conduct, which seems to be a wise course of action. As the story goes on to document, more than 1,200 cases were dismissed _without_ any supporting videotaped evidence.
So the "shift[ing] of the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention" didn't have anything to do with rogue testimony by the police–there's only reported evidence of it happening in the case of one officer, and the rest of the report is silent about any other case.
I would add to Jimmie's comment: …And it wouldn't be surprising to learn that someone who massages a 3-year-old story about one New York police officer to support his claims about today's New York police officers in general lies the most often of all!
"Warren, I have not, in nearly twenty years, seen someone charged with Resisting who didn’t physically struggle against the arrest. I admit I’ve not seen every arrest made by the officers with whom I’ve worked, but I’ve seen dozens and dozens of folks charged with that, and none of them got it just for arguing."
You also can get resisting arrest for providing false identification (verbally, not presenting false documents). This is a very common one in college towns.