Editorial: You owe another $5 for excessive force by L.A. County sheriff’s deputies. Pay up or be penalized.
A few years ago, I was attending a symposium on the history of Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies at UCLA, sponsored by the department’s departmental History Department. At one point the moderator, a scholar who was a professor of history at the time, made the point that there was rampant pay-to-play corruption within Sheriff Lee Baca’s command staff in the past.
I’ve thought about this topic a great deal over the years, and was always impressed to see how many of the top echelon sheriff’s officials were paid to do the things that would bring in the most money, with none of the oversight to make sure they weren’t doing things as a corrupt pay-to-play scam.
That’s what happened in the case of L.A. County sheriff’s deputy Scott Miller, who now faces charges of felony assault with a deadly weapon after the video, now available for the world to see on TMZ.
In this video, a motorist who was being pursued by Scott is stopped by Miller’s squad car, and his passenger asks the deputy for a cigarette. Miller stops the chase, and when he does he throws the passenger to the ground with a knee in the back which, if true, is a very serious assault on public safety.
But the video shows that Miller did it, he tells the passenger he’s going to arrest him for DUI and battery upon a law enforcement officer, and then throws him down.
If this video is true, then I’d like to ask the two questions:
What is a “felony assault with a deadly weapon,” or what is a “deadly weapon” for the purposes of any crime?
And what is a felony assault with a deadly weapon?
It seems to me they could have charged Scott Miller with murder and be done with it. He did that to this man, and did it by striking him in the back of the