After 50 years of ‘lawyering crime,’ in Eastern Ky., here’s some ideas about police reform

This week will mark my 50th year of lawyering crime and that has resulted in almost daily contact and interaction with policemen and policewomen, from High Sheriffs down and from High Sheriffs up, from Constables to federal marshals to FBI’s.

So I am going to explain all these cops to you now.

First of all, they are exactly like everybody else in that they are all different. As a group they do like guns too much. If I were to make a list of the 100 most admired people I have ever known, there would be a lot of police on there. Like James Harmon, a state police homicide detective who provided me with useful information that led to an acquittal in my first murder case. Years later, we left him on a jury trying a death penalty case. As a defense attorney I have made it a practice to leave on juries current or former police. First of all, they are honored that a defendant would trust them, and secondly, they have given breaks to lawbreakers dozens of times in their lives.

That list would include Freddie Bailey, whose broad grin under his Kentucky State Police hat to a woman berating him in his face lit up the screen in Barbara Koppel’s award winning “Harlan County USA.”

And, as Melvin Goins would say, many, many more.

If I were to make a list of 100 people I have known in my life and remember uncharitably, that list would also list a few police. We had one longtime policeperson up here, now deceased, who was hell-bent on killing somebody someday and one day did. My wife personally watched him take seven handguns off his body once at the entrance to a prison. Everybody knew he would kill, but how do you get rid of such a person? I have presented cases to juries of handcuffed old men being beaten in public by uniformed officers, of shootings without cause done by law officers, and have yet to get a single vote from one of those jurors against the police. This enables the occasional policeman who would cross the line. The fact that juries are afraid of the police also means that a very few horrible cops can embarrass the rest by public murder.

Two things must develop, and neither will happen overnight.

First, police must quit honoring their unwritten code of silence by which it assumed that one policeman will not tell on another.

That is dishonorable and should be taught as such. That code instantly makes any bystanding cop an accomplice to a crime being committed by another policeperson.

Secondly, they have got to quit arresting people for piddly stuff.

But abolition of the gendarmes? Well, not just yet. Once in law school, in the radical sixties, a law professor asserted that it was only a riot when the police arrived. An Army veteran, with a flattop hair cut and older than the rest of us, drawled in Southeast Kentucky tones, “Let’s just extend that analogy to the fire department.”

Larry Webster is an attorney in Pikeville.

This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 11:21 AM.