On the local front

Some thoughts on a few local stories:

– An enterprising young fellow at California University of Pennsylvania are firing up a website designed to allow students interested in “hooking up” with other students to avail themselves of a sort of online free love clearinghouse. It bills itself as “safer than Craigslist and cheaper than bars.” My guess is that the vast, vast majority of those signing up will be horny male students doing some wishful thinking.

– Police in Charleroi have charged a local man with cruelty to animals after finding two pit bulls that had starved to death in cages in a home the man formerly lived in. One can only imagine the suffering those animals went through before they mercifully died. I'm hoping that a judge will make an example of 24-year-old Stanley McDonald and give him as much jail time as the charge allows, provided he is found guilty. I saw a friend or relative of McDonald's on TV claiming that McDonald thought a friend was going to take care of the dogs. Count me among those who think that is bull@#$%.

– I'm rarely surprised by anything Washington City Council does, but I was still puzzled by the story about the hiring of Ron McIntyre, a city police officer disabled in a fall during the 2006 fire at the George Washington Hotel, as the new city code enforcement officer. It's not that I have doubts about McIntyre's ability to do the job. It's the rate of pay for the duties being performed. The old code enforcement officer, Mike Behrens, made $41,000 a year. McIntyre will be making $35,000, but city solicitor Lane Turturice says his duties will only be about half that of Behrens. The solicitor says McIntyre will primarily be involved with rental registrations, while the action code enforcement will be done by fire Chief Linn Brookman and someone from North Strabane Township. Can someone explain to me why McIntyre will be paid nearly the same as Behrens for only half the work? That's a great job if you can get it.

Trouble in Troop B

It sure hasn’t been a good couple of months for Troop B of the Pennsylvania State Police. First, Trooper Ed Joyner gets ensnared in the whole Ben Roethlisberger mess, and now another trooper, Daniel Freeman, has been arrested on charges he tried to hire a suspected drug dealer to torch his girlfriend’s home. Freeman, who has been suspended for the past few months, certainly has a presumption of innocence. It's up to a court to decide whether he’s guilty of the arson-related charges. But this won’t be Freeman’s first time facing a judge from the wrong side of the bench. He was charged with DUI after running his vehicle into two parked cars on Route 40 in North Bethlehem Township in June 2008. His blood-alcohol content was double the legal limit. My question is this: Why was Freeman not immediately booted from the state police force? Shouldn’t people who are sworn to uphold the law be held to a higher standard than the average citizen? I'm a reasonable person. If someone gets pulled over and blows a .08 on the Breathalyzer, that's a mistake, and it probably can be forgiven, once. But when you're at twice the legal limit, you know damn well that you're too drunk to be behind the wheel. And then there's Joyner, who was working a side job providing security for Roethlisberger. You would think that a state trooper who had his name linked to the despicable behavior that allegedly went on in that bar in Milledgeville, Ga., would run far and fast away from the disgraced athlete and be very, very thankful that he was not fired for bringing disrepute to the force. But not Joyner. The state police rescinded the approval for him to work for Roethlisberger, and Joyner appealed the decision. That's just unreal. He's lucky the state police can't fire someone solely on the grounds of being dumb and/or arrogant. I guess Joyner figures that no matter what happens, his union will help him come out on top, and based on past history with unions and grievance proceedings, he may be right. The real shame of all this is that the image of many fine state troopers is taking an unfair beating in the court of public opinion. They deserve better.

Smart move?

There's no doubt that Tiger Woods is well within his legal rights in declining to talk with police about the car accident outside his mansion late last week, but one wonders whether he's doing himself any favors by not being upfront about what went down. At this point, the facts appear to be as follows: In the wee hours of Saturday morning, Woods reportedly mowed down a fire hyrdrant and hit a tree with his Cadillac Escalade while leaving his driveway. When emergency personnel arrived, they found him bleeding from the mouth and going in and out of consciousness. His wife reportedly used a golf club to bash out the back windows of the Caddy and help him from the vehicle. Woods initially gave indications that he would talk to police about the wreck, but after putting them off for a couple of days, he sent his attorney out to give officers his driver's license, registration and proof of insurance. Legally, that's all he has to do. But from a public relations standpoint, his refusal to address the details of the wreck publicly are leading to the very kind of speculation he'd be better off without. "This is a private matter, and I want to keep it that way," Woods said in a statement. He may very well wish that it were a private matter, but Woods happens to be the most famous athlete in the world, who puts himself front and center with multimillion-dollar endorsement deals, and when he starts slamming into fire hydrants and trees with his luxury vehicle, it's big news. Especially since it follows by mere days a National Enquirer report that Woods had been seeing a nightclub hostess and that they were together in Australia when Woods played in a golf tournament there. No one has suggested that Woods was drunk when the wreck occurred, but some certainly are left to wonder whether he was speeding away from his house after a go-round with the missus. Others have suggested that the mouth injuries the golfer suffered might have been inflicted by an angry spouse, not the steering wheel of an Escalade. Still others question how Woods could have had a wreck such as he reported being involved in and not have the airbags of the Caddy deploy. And is it remotely possible that Tiger’s bride bashed out the windows of the SUV before the wreck, perhaps as her hubby was hightailing it out of the driveway? As the AP asks in a story today, if Woods just made a driving blunder, why wouldn't he simply talk to the police and tell them that? Hmmmmmm.

Can you believe this?

I commented recently about the case of a Pittsburgh police officer who escaped criminal punishment for allegedly pistol-whipping and wounding a man on the city's South Side. Little did I know that the handling of that case would look like brilliant jurisprudence compared with what went down Tuesday in Chicago. A Chicago police officer who was found guilty of beating the living daylights out of a female bartender half his size got no jail time for the brutal attack. Anthony Abbate, who was off duty in February 2007 when he had a violent confrontation with barmaid Karolina Obrycka, walked away with two years of probation and an order to take anger-management classes. Talk about closing the barn door after the horse escaped. Prosecutors wanted Abbate to do some prison time, but in one of the stupidest statements ever made from the bench, Circuit Judge John Fleming said he saw no aggravating factors that would warrant a prison sentence. Why don't you look at the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49kgG0s7lVk and decide whether you see any aggravating circumstances. As you'll probably note, the 250-pound police officer, in response to Obrycka trying to remove him from the bar area, throws the 125-pound woman to the ground and holds her by the hair while punching, kneeing and kicking her. We have to assume that seeing a bear of a man opening up a can of whoop-ass on a small woman doesn't offend the judge's sensibilities. Fleming added, "If I believed sentencing Anthony Abbate to prison would stop people from getting drunk and hitting people, I'd give him the maximum sentence." Under Fleming's twisted way of thinking, we should just set murderers free, because clearly sentencing murderers to life in prison or capital punishment hasn't stopped homicides. Abbate, who was admittedly drunk during the confrontation, used the defense that the lady pushed him first. Oh, I see. If a girl pushes you first, it's OK to beat the hell out of her. And defense attorney Peter Hickey had the gall to add, "He's not a bad man; he did something bad." Not a bad man? A good man doesn't beat a woman half his size. No, let me rephrase that. A good man doesn't beat a woman, PERIOD. The police department says it wants to fire Abbate, who has been on unpaid suspension. What do you want to bet that the police union tries to block it?

Here's why people lose faith in the justice system

If Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Manning has to run for retention to the bench anytime soon, one would expect that he'll have the full support of the Fraternal Order of Police. On Thursday, Manning tossed out criminal charges against a suspended Pittsburgh police officer accused of pistol-whipping and wounding a man on the city's South Side, saying the officer's actions were "inappropriate" but not criminal. Let's see what you think. The case against Officer Paul Abel stemmed from his attempt to arrest Kaleb Miller for aggravated assault last June 28 following an altercation. The officer, who was off duty, alleged that Miller punched him in the face as he sat in his car after leaving a bar at about 2 a.m. Abel said he drove around the block, spotted Miller and needed to use force to effect an arrest because Miller refused to follow his orders. He said his service revolver went off during the struggle. Others tell a much different story, according to a report in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Miller denied that he punched the officer, and witnesses testified that Miller bore no resemblance to the man who had attacked the policeman. They also said Abel hit Miller in the neck with his Glock handgun, causing it to discharge, and Miller was grazed in the hand by a bullet. Despite that, Manning dismissed all charges related to the confrontation, saying the law gives police officers discretion when it comes to use of force and that "it is not the obligation of this court to police the police department." A group that is charged with policing the police department, the Citizens Police Review Board, is very familiar with Abel. In addition to the Miller case, the panel has three other pending complaints against Abel, the P-G reports. One incident involves a 2007 county courthouse brawl involving Abel and his brother-in-law. In the second, Abel is accused of trying to get his wife to make false sexual-abuse claims against her children's grandparents. And in the third, an Allentown man claims he was brutalized by the officer. In the Miller case, Abel also originally faced a DUI charge, but that was dismissed because a blood-alcohol test wasn't taken until three-and-a-half hours after the incident. The law requires a test within two hours. Abel admitted drinking four beers and two shots of liquor that night on the South Side, but Pittsburgh Officer Dan O'Hara, who responded to the scene, said he saw no signs that Abel was intoxicated. Oh, did I mention that the test that was conducted more than three hours later found Abel had a blood-alcohol level of .111? Wait, one other thing. O'Hara, the guy who didn't think Abel was drunk, just happens to be president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 1 and says he'll be fighting to get Abel reinstated to the force. Of course.