PER:Guilty Policemen

   From the Detroit News (Oct. 1, 1989) we read that "the police had
been chasing a vehicle, a Ford Mustang convertible, for a traffic
violation, but had lost it. A crash occured a few minutes later when
the police were no longer in pursuit. The police later said the car was
stolen." The Mustang slammed into an empty commercial building at
Puritan and Ohio Streets. Out of the car one black woman was taken to
the hospital, where she died, and the other two blacks were pronounced
dead at Mt. Carmel Mercy hospital. A fourth person in the car--17- year
old Ivy Donaldson of Detroit--was in critical condition. Police began
chasing the car at about 7:50. The car slammed into something at about
8:10.

   An eyewitness, who owns a barbershop, says, "I went out and saw the
car in the air, it was turning and flipping, and it hit the telephone
pole. It bounced off a telephone pole and hit the building. It took
about forty-five minutes before anybody got here to help those people.
The police just went over and looked at them, but they wouldn't let
anybody help. Once the EMS got here, I don't think there was much use
in trying to revive them. There should have been somebody here to help
those people." This doesn't look like much on the surface, but in
Toledo, Ohio, recently a young black boy was caught stealing cases of
Cokes, and upon being chased at night he fell into a stream and
drowned. Believe it or not, the police were held iiable for the
fellow's death because they didn't jump into the stream to try to pull
him out. This is the logical, twisted outcome of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, where the rights of criminals are so well protected that a
policeman is not merely in danger of being arrested and going to jail
for shooting one of them (or abusing one of them, or being brutal with
one of them), he is in danger of going to jail if he doesn't try to
rescue them after they have committed a felony. "The land of the free
and the home of the brave."
