East Haven police follow-up

A follow-up to my post from 10 days ago about the priest in East Haven, Connecticut arrested for videotaping police harassing a Hispanic storekeeper.

My brother Chuck posted a link to a New Haven Independent news item with the above video of the priest's arrest. Chuck has a capacity for understatement in titling his post "Priest’s Video Contradicts Police Report":

...David Cari, one of two arresting officers, states that he didn’t know what the New Haven priest was holding. He wrote that he saw an “unknown shiny silver object” that Manship had “cupped” in his hands, and was afraid for his safety.

Er, not to put too fine a point on it, but the cop fucking lied and should, at a minimum, be suspended for filing a false report. Naturally, East Haven's attorney doesn't see it that way:

Contacted by phone, Attorney Hugh Keefe, representing the East Haven police department, said that the video doesn’t discredit the police report.

“The problem is we don’t know what happened prior to the video,” Keefe said.

Keefe said that prior to start of the video recording, the police officer had been unaware of what Manship was holding. “The issue is before that whether he was concealing something,” Keefe said.

The attorney called the video “clearly inconclusive.”

Right. The one thing that is "clear" here is that the only hand of Father Manship's the cop could have seen would have been the hand holding the camera. He knew exactly what was in his hand and what he was doing. The cop's a liar and a thug.