Twenty pages, and she found room in there to blame the men who worked it. I read the whole thing Saturday morning at the kitchen table. As far as I can tell, I read it alone.
The Pirro filing landed Friday afternoon, and by Saturday every anchor in the country had it shelved under swimming pools. Somewhere in the middle of it the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia explains that her office brought a felony because Park Police officials fed her bad information. Nobody on television stopped on that sentence. I stopped on it for an hour.
Twenty-two years on the job tells you what a line like that costs. It costs a sergeant the benefit of the doubt at his next hearing. It costs some kid three years out of the academy every report he will ever write.
What the Pirro Filing Says About the Officers
Her office relied on what Interior handed over and on police testimony about where the man was standing. That is how a case gets built. Anybody who has worked one knows it, and anybody who hasn’t should sit down. Then 695 megabytes of documents came in and she decided the damage traced back to a rushed installation.
So she was wrong. Prosecutors are wrong constantly and it never runs twenty pages. What happened here is that she went looking for somebody to hand it to, and the men in uniform were standing closest to the door. The consultants who went out and measured the seams came out of this looking better than the officers did.
Before Anybody Starts On the Contract
I know where this is going. Someone will bring up that the work went out without competitive bidding, and that the Secretary who oversaw it is the same Secretary now arguing with the prosecutor on social media. Nobody has alleged anything. I am raising it myself so the record shows I looked and moved on. A contract is paperwork. Paperwork never put a man in handcuffs. Officers do that, and officers are the ones eating this one. The Department has been careful with what it protects out there, and our newsroom covered how far that protection extends.
What the Pirro Filing Costs the Next Guy
Saturday I was reading it out loud in the driveway and my neighbor, who teaches shop over at the high school, asked me what became of the fellow they charged. Sixty-seven years old, I told him, and they dropped the whole thing. He said good, and went back to his mower. That is the caliber of thinking this profession is up against now.
Here is what nobody standing at that podium in July understood. You put a prosecutor’s name on an apology and she survives it. Put a department’s name on it and the department survives it. Put it on the officers who wrote the report, and twelve years from now some kid in a patrol car hesitates for half a second before he writes down what he saw. Half a second is the whole job. I had three Internal Affairs files opened on me and a civil settlement the county’s lawyers called a settlement and I have always called an exoneration, and I never hesitated once. I’ve seen how this ends.
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