the bad attitude of the law

Leander Pickett is a teacher’s assistant at Englewood Elementary. According to colleagues, he’s a nice guy and a hard worker. On Tuesday he was directing traffic in the morning outside the school, making sure the bus “load/unload zone” was going smoothly. Then his day went all to shit. You see, two Homeland Security officers had pulled into the school’s loading zone “to look at a map”. When Pickett told them they had to move, they said “we’re Homeland Security, we’ll fuck your shit up if you don’t shut up”. I’m only slightly exaggerating:

[A]s Pickett was directing bus traffic, he said he was handcuffed and roughed up and humiliated by the very people that were supposed to protect him.

“I walked up to him and said, ‘Sir, you need to move.’ That’s when he said ‘I’m a police officer. I’m with Homeland Security … I’ll move it when I want to.’ That’s when he started grabbing me on my arm,” Pickett said.

Englewood media specialist, Terri Dreisonstok, went out and told them that Pickett was indeed an employee and he was right, etc… Says Terri:

“At that point I intervened and I went up to the gentleman and said, ‘Mr. Pickett is an employee here,’ and they said that didn’t matter. ‘We’re with Homeland Security,’ and on and on they went, and pretty soon, before you know it, he’s handcuffed and slammed against a car,” Brinson said. “All the children are watching, they’re all upset.”

All the kids were watching this. Nice. There are other people who witnessed the exchange/incident and all of them back-up Pickett’s account. Of course, Homeland Security doesn’t care about facts:

The department also said it’s looking into what happened, and that Pickett’s version is wrong. It claims he was antagonizing the officers.

It’s only just looking into but it already knows that Pickett is wrong—no matter those pesky witnesses. He antagonized the officers by telling them they needed to move their car away from a school bus loading/unloading zone. What-fucking-ever.

“If this is Homeland Security, I think we ought to be a little afraid,” Brinson [Gail, principal of Englewood] said.

Pickett is planning on suing. So how long after the “stonewall-admit-nothing” defense doesn’t work will the “few bad apples” bullshit be trotted out?