If police are our servants — rather than our armed overseers — why do they feel entitled to punish us for showing them “disrespect”?
Drupatty Jaipersaud, who operates a Chevron station in Lawrenceville, Georgia, found herself in a real mess when the gas pumps ran dry during a sudden fuel shortage in September 2008. An aggravated customer apparently thought that the store owner (a woman of east Indian descent who was born in Guyana) didn’t want to sell him gas on account of his ethnic background. When told that the station had no gasoline, the customer — who verbally abused the store owner — refused to leave.
Jaipersaud made the common — and by now inexcusable — mistake of calling the police, expecting that they would help. Predictably, matters immediately got much worse when five officers arrived to deal with the minor dispute. Among them was Detective Tim Ashley, who enjoys perfect job security despite numerous suspensions for misconduct (including a threatening phone call to his ex-wife’s boyfriend, and refusing to respond to a homicide call while on duty).
The customer claimed that Jaipersaud had struck him. She insisted that the store’s security video would demonstrate that she had done no such thing — but she didn’t know how to access it. Ashley demanded that she call her son, who was at school.
“He said I need to get him here now or else,” Jaipersaud recalled. “I asked him if he was threatening me…. And he said, `No, I’m arresting you.’” The officer later explained that he arrested Jaipersaud for being “disrespectful.” She spent ten hours in jail for what was later determined to be a wrongful arrest. A jury awarded Jaipersaud nearly $140,000 in damages. That amount will be paid by the city government’s tax victims, of course...
