I swear. Saban knows no limits. His defense was hit hard by graduation, injury, suspension…what’s he to do when his team captain and starting safety is arrested? Normal, human coaches would try to coerce the police to go easy on him. Screw that. Saban skips the cops and goes straight to manipulating video evidence. Four times actually. Four separate surveillance cameras directly contradicted the report the officer filed.
See, there’s no possible way that a cop lied. If he said Johnson resisted arrest then that’s what happened. Right? Umm, no.
Now here’s the great part. The Tuscaloosa City attorney has agreed to drop the disorderly conduct charge with the condition that he performs community service. Yep, you read that right. I’m sure the city attorney phrased it otherwise, but he might as well have said, “Rashad, we lied, we hurt your reputation, and we brought negative attention to you and your teammates. Someone is going to pay for it. Rashad, that someone is you.” He didn’t do what he was accused of doing, and since they would get reamed in court if they prosecuted, they’ve agreed to just punish him like they planned without all that burden of proof nonsense.
There’s no indication that officer Derek Kilgore who wrote the fallacious report will have any sort of suspension. You remember suspension, right? It’s that thing the angry masses demanded Johnson receive? Saban mentioned it. He said that Johnson would not be getting one because of what he saw. Saban took a lot of heat for that decision, too. Imagine that. He said that he took each offense case by case. Silly Saban. It’s not important whether they actually did anything wrong or not. It only matters that they were in a public place with thousands of other people when the clock said three AM. Judgment must be swift and severe. And whenever possible, uninformed.
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I wonder what the videotapes did show then.
To play devil’s advocate a bit, it’d be quite realistic to suppose that the tapes showed some form of misconduct other than what the police report stated - perhaps something of a much lesser degree. In that case, a bit of community service and a nonexplanation of the tapes would make perfect sense: the (hypothetical) misconduct would be atoned for, and the true happenings would never go public.
I don’t write that with any antagonism. I don’t know anything about the TPD, and I don’t know anything about the incident itself. But from the linked article and this write-up, I can see possibilities that work either way.
Admittedly, I was taking it to the opposite extreme and could see that something might still have happened. The only problem with that is that he only received one charge and it was for a misdemeanor. If they drop that charge (which was what the attorney stated they were doing), what are they legally punishing him for? If the videos had shown disorderly conduct then they would just go to trial and show the video and say the report was a bit exaggerated but the video evidence shows something happened. Obviously, I don’t get to see the video either, but it sounds like a police officer saw a muscular black man potentially involved in a fight, and rather than waiting to determine if the guy was a threat, he decided to aggressively neutralize the threat before it could get bad. Honestly, at this point–other than racial profiling if that was the case–I don’t have a problem with the proactive approach. What does bother me is that after he proved to not be a threat, they arrested him anyway and then made up a story that was entered as fact to justify what they did.
Certainly it’s bothersome. I’m speaking largely out of ignorance, as I hadn’t even heard of this until I read your post. It confuses me, too, as there has to be some reason to request community service. Even if it’s illogical, somebody had to have come up with a reason for it, and I can’t really see why that might be.
The police report is a problem either way. If it hadn’t been for the cameras, that report would have been the primary evidence and would have been very difficult to overcome.