BP#2: LAPD officers charged with covering up DUI crash, taking the driver home and filing false police report – an article from the LA Times.

According to Matt Hamilton of The Los Angeles Times, two female LAPD officers were charged with covering up a DUI  last week Tuesday. The pair, Rene Ponce and Irene Gomez were patrolling the Hollenbeck Division’s Boyle Heights area on Oct. 26, 2014. When they were called to a crash on the 3000 block of East Side Boulevard. The women caught the perpetrator who smashed his vehicle into two other parked cars, due to alcohol intoxication.

Instead of following procedure, Ponce and Gomez decided not to preform a drunk driving investigation. The reported that the person of interest escaped on foot, and the car was left behind at the scene. Ponce and Gomez further escalated the situation when they drove the suspect home, and told him to “get some rest.” In the article I read, Matt Hamilton mentions that the deputy district attorney found no link between the women and the suspect; who will remain anonymous because the case is still under investigation.

“Deputy Dist. Atty. Martha Carrillo, the prosecutor who signed the criminal complaint against the two officers, said the officers and the driver had no personal or professional connection. The driver is also not connected to the LAPD or other law enforcement agencies” (Los Angeles Times).

 I find all of this extremely odd. Why risk your job, and your reputation for some random person who should have gone to jail for drinking and getting behind the wheel? In relation to the idea of integrity, I would say that these women who were supposed to obey and enforce the law failed to do so.Therefor they have no integrity, and neither does the unidentified male who drank and drove. In the book Ethics Across The Professions, Lynne McFall defines integrity in her piece Integrity, as the coherence between principle and action.

These officers failed to walk their talk. You cannot say one thing and do another. Citizens can’t trust cops who free drunk drivers; or anyone who breaks the law. what if that same drunk driver runs you down? Those two now untrustworthy, inconsistent cops will probably come and clean up his mess again, which goes against everything they are supposed to sand for. If a person doesn’t stick to our core principles, especially during challenges or trying times then maybe they were never a person of integrity to begin with.

 http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-lapd-officers-charged-dui-crash-20160913-snap-story.html#nt=related-content