A Cop in Trouble: The strange case of Officer Mette
The most glaring of all cops in trouble story concerns Chicago police officer Michael Mette, who was wrongfully incarcerated in Iowa a while back after he was convicted of fighting in that state.
If you don’t know his story, which has been brought to our attention by John Kass, a reporter at the Chicago Tribune and subsequently written about here at our MAP website, I strongly suggest you try to research Mr. Kass’ articles at the Tribune.
Officer Mette, in sum, got into a fistfight at a party while in Iowa. Officer Mette was not the aggressor. He defended himself from a couple of drunks only after being assaulted.
Injuries occurred to the aggressor but none that were permanent. The guy who started the fight has a history of obnoxious and drunken behavior by all accounts, but Officer Mette was served up as the bad guy by a local prosecutor who claimed that the officer should have tried to retreat from the harm being accosted on him and his buddy by the aggressor.
The prosecutor also suggested that the officer should have tried to reason with his attacker. Yeah, okay, all of you law enforcement personnel out there know how easy it is to reason with a person who had a blood-alcohol level of 0.27 percent, don’t you?
We bring this up once again because the Iowa Appeals Court has heard this case in early September and asked some interesting common sense questions about the case according to Mr. Kass’ article.
We are all hoping that the justices see the travesty of a five-year prison sentence given to this officer by an overreaching prosecutor and judge.
Someone has to end this insanity. A good person’s life has been ruined by their senseless overzealousness. It should give you all pause that this is not a case of a police officer gone bad, but a system, at least in Iowa, that has.
Are the institutions and the people we serve and have given numerous lives over really have it in for us as law enforcement officers, that they would impose such a harsh sentence on only one of the mutual combatants—and not the one who started the fight?
It is totally insane that regardless of the fact that the aggressor sustained some injuries that you could get five years in the tank for defending yourself based on the premise that as a police officer, you should know better and either run away from danger or try to reason with a person who is attacking you. I would think that maybe in this part of Iowa, as in the entire USA, that at least prosecutors and judges should realize that police officers are not trained to run away. We are trained to confront criminals, even if they are drunken citizens who wish to do us harm. Yes, attempting to reason with someone falls within our training, but certainly not when someone is actually assaulting us.
I would suggest that if an officer did what this prosecutor suggested, when an everyday citizen is assaulted, you know, flee from harm, policing as we know it would start its long, ungraceful fall from pride, integrity, and guts.
Pray for an Appellate Court decision that rights this wrong, and look up these articles.
Stay safe.
Posted September 20, 2008