I Want These Officers to Live in Terror of the Truth

NYT, 4/11/05 (My italics.)
“…the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue. ‘We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed,’ the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. ‘I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own.’
“…But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges. During a recess, the defense had brought….A videotape…[that] showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints…”
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I want this officer to see years of hard prison time. How much felonious perjury is laid out right here in these paragraphs? How much casual impunity does it imply? A subculture of police-perjury, of life-threatening and career-ending lies by police against innocents arbitrarily accused.
Ironically, this is where hard-line penal deterrence can really change the way the world works–far more effectively than punishment of the destitute and drug-addicted, where deterrence can make a sadly minimal difference to the actual prospects of people’s already wounded lives.
Police-perjury is manifestly epidemic in America. To return to the NYT article, as a small indication of the scale:
“For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.”
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Little Brother is watching them, and we must all be Little Brother to helpless people who are accused falsely of crimes.