By Tom

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**The following is an excerpt from an upcoming Worst Fans podcast series called “You Don’t Know Jack.” The series centers around St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Jack Flaherty, his upbringing, BLM activism, and tackles some of the criticisms he’s received through the years.**

Cops lie, blame, and kill people all the time. On average they kill over 1,000 people per year. In 2022 they killed nearly eleven hundred. Most of the people they kill are younger than 40 years old. They are mostly white, although if you’re hispanic your chances of being killed by the police are more likely, and if you’re black you are over twice as likely to be butchered. Police under report their own misdeeds to make them look good, save face, or prevent embarrassment, but really they do so to avoid paying any meaningful price for what they do. They under report how serious they take rape and sexual assault; they do so by gaslighting victims, not administering rape kits, or failing to investigate all-together. In numerous instances, women have to sue the police themselves to investigate their rape; in Travis County, Texas more than a dozen women sued the sheriff’s department for failing to investigate their sexual assault allegations. Over 125,000 rapes are reported in America and the rapist is brought to justice 2% of the time–now imagine, will you, the amount of rapes that are never reported because of incompetency like this–and it’s not just in the United States either; In 2015, police in the United Kingdom failed to bring charges against right-wing iconoclast Andrew Tate after he brutally assaulted a woman–numerous women have also come forward around this time–after his release Tate moved to Romania where he and his brother set up a seedy webcam business. In December Romanian police arrested Tate and his brother for human and sex trafficking.

The police lie too. They lie maybe not all the time, but enough. Despite this they are still taken seriously and with much credulity. They lied about their failure to respond in Uvalde when a gunman killed 21 people, including 19 elementary children. They lie with prosecutors and deputy attorneys like when they shot and killed 13 year-old Adam Toledo. They lied on paperwork like the search warrant in Breonna Taylor’s death. They lie about being in danger for their lives and they lie about if those people posed a threat, like in the death of Walter Scott. Remember what we just said about them killing 1,000 people? Well they lie about that too, no one knows how many people police officially kill each year because they fail to report them most of the time, but experts think the number of fatal police shootings may be three times what’s reported. This is the price you have to pay to protect car lots, Walgreens, QuikTrips, and vacant homes and hotels. They lie all the time because they’re ultimately the good guys, right?  

It is mostly Catholic and white, with about 6% of its population being black, which has reduced drastically since 2000. Twenty years ago Leonardtown was very poor, with over a fifth of its population living below the poverty line. Now that number is less than 6%, with expectations to grow the city with a redeveloped waterfront, and the expectation of the surrounding population to increase by 4,000. 

It is very conservative, along with the rest of St. Mary’s County. Over 110,000 people live in St. Mary’s, a population that has boomed in the last thirty years. All the members of the Board of Commissioners are republicans, their state attorney is republican, two of their three circuit judges are republican. The last time St. Mary’s County voted for a Democrat was 1976. They have remained, largely, a conservative stronghold for the last forty-plus years. They are protected and served by Troops Barracks T of the Maryland State Police. There are currently 23 state trooper barracks in the state of Maryland, employing over 2,000 people, 1,400 of them state police. The troopers are 90% male and over three-quarters white, they wear Stetson hats, kevlar–later this year, they are supposed to be outfitted with body cameras, which prior to have not been required to wear–and carry with them a service-issued Glock 22 chambered in .40 Smith & Wesson. They sometimes carry Remington 870 shotguns, Colt AR-15 or M16A1 semi-automatic rifles, they carry all this on or around them, usually stored in either a Ford Police Interceptor, Caprice 9C1, Chevy Tahoe, or the good old fashioned Crown Vic, they also have helicopters and a couple planes at their disposal. They have access to resources beyond standard field materiel, like when they conducted domestic spying on 53 individuals, 2 of them being Catholic nuns in 2008. 

They may not be perfect, but they’re not monsters.

But trust me when I say we should trust them, they are the good guys afterall.

Peyton Ham and his family probably didn’t care or notice these things like I do. There was much bigger fish to fry. Peyton was a sophomore attending Leonardtown High School, a large high school that competed in 4A sports. In 2010 they were named in the top 1% of high schools by Newsweek. Peyton was part of a mock trial team at Leonardtown, he told his mother, Kristee Boyle, that he was going to become a lawyer. He was known to be inquisitive and an old soul. His favorite subject in school was history–ancient history to be precise–and he was a consummate student. He was big too, six feet one inch, with big shoulder length curly dark hair–like burnt wood–he had braces that bridged the gap between two large front teeth that stood like stage performers on a very large and infectious smile. In an article by Dave McKenna, the Raleys show a short video of Peyton admiring his hair and preening on their doorbell cam. He was close to his maternal grandparents, Keith and Brenda Raley. He would go to sleepovers with his grandparents, help them cook, and watch Orioles baseball; other times they would attend O’s games, a frequent meet-up for the family. One of his last days as a living thing was watching movies at his grandparents, and playing with their dogs. 

Like most close families in small-towns, the Raleys and Boyles were close to their community too. Kristee worked with local police as a security specialist for St. Mary’s County Public Schools, she and Peyton would volunteer with other civilians and local cops for a Christmas charity called “Shop with a Cop.” Keith Raley was a Volunteer fireman for 49 years, and during that time met and befriended a lot of police officers. 

A day after checking himself out on the door cam and playing with his grandparents dogs, that Blue Wall of trust would be shattered when Peyton Ham was shot and killed by Maryland State Trooper Joseph Azzari.

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You can never truly understand what is going on inside someone’s mind. Try hard enough to do so and it might drive you insane. The official state attorney’s report is that Peyton Ham twice called police and reported a suspicious man with a firearm. In the agonizing months that would follow, police would chalk it up as suicide by cop, that Peyton had a mental blip stemming from recent poor performance in school that they found in emails and text messages. These sorts of things happen, you see, and police have the tough job of making split second decisions that result in life or death–some of them so jarring, if you ask them, they may not want to report it to people like the FBI. Joseph Azzari would be cleared and free to go back out and keep the people of St. Mary’s County safe. He is one of the good guys after all.

There is not much to be said about Azzari. He was hired in 2019 and is a former United States marine. According to the Maryland State Police he has never done much of anything wrong, aside from a few technical uniform violations. He is well-built but not as domineering as Ham, who holds about five to six inches on him. Azzari was the first to arrive on the scene, he initially pulled his SUV into Michelle Mills’s driveway, located next door to Ham’s home, before parking behind the house. Police reports are conflicting, but Ham allegedly approached Azzari from Mills’s driveway pointing a gun at Azzari in a “shooter’s stance.”

He shouted for Peyton to drop the gun. According to the police report Peyton did not. Azzari fired 11 shots from his Glock 22. 3 of those bullets struck Peyton in his right arm and shoulder. 8 of those shots traveled into the neighboring trees, bushes, and houses, 3 of them struck a neighbor’s garage. 

What occurs next is why we’re here. A minute after shooting a 16 year-old sophomore, Azzari approached Ham to administer medical aid–police’s words–but noticed the boy had a knife. He pointed his service weapon at Ham, repeatedly telling him to throw down the knife. Ham’s step-grandmother, Victoria Boyle–who lived in the guest house of his parent’s home–is outside shouting at him to do whatever the officer does. Michelle Ham and her daughter, Allison, take an iPhone Live photo 7 seconds after the initial salvo. Back-up is seen arriving a few houses down. Azzari screams about the knife, Ham reaches into his pocket and pulls one out–a 2.5 inch blade–and a few seconds later Azzari empties the remaining four shots in his magazine–three of them striking Ham in the neck and shoulder–and kills him.

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Some of you already know where this is going. We like to position our content as accessible to everyone, but remember this piece is for the people who don’t like Jack Flaherty. Who publicly criticize him for his politics, even though the only politics Flaherty has been outspoken on has been police violence. It’s not that Midwestern Cardinals fans are anti-speak-your-mind, instead they’re more pro-police than they care to be explicit about. In 2014 teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson is over two-thirds black, although it used to be predominantly white until the onset of White Flight convinced middle class whites to leave and form their own sealed covenants and communities, leaving behind homes that would be sold at extortion rates to blacks trying to fill the void. The Ferguson police force, at the time, had 53 cops and only 3 of them were black. The ensuing protests that followed in St. Louis touched off a powder keg of demonstrations–some violent, but mostly peaceful–across the United States. During this time, the grassroots social movement Black Lives Matter, spearheaded numerous forms of protests and civil disobedience.

If you live in St. Louis you probably understand the dichotomy between County and City folks. The further west you travel the more affluence and detachment you encounter. St. Louis City is a swath of diverse thought, culture, politics, and food, and county is middle to upper class white. The city is represented by Cori Bush, a black Justice Democrat who ousted a political stalwart in Lacy Clay. In Ferguson she was a triage nurse–her career background–and organizer–she was a pastor for 3 years. As soon as you hit Ladue or Maryland Heights or Creve Couer you enter Ann Wagner’s District, which has gone republican since 1993, and if you cross the Missouri into St. Charles County–the fastest growing county in the state–you’ll find Blaine Luetkemeyer and a congressional district that stretches to the Ozarks. Luetkemeyer won a seat that was a democratic stronghold until it was redistricted in 2013, making it a conservative lock.

Outside of Busch Stadium in 2014 an ugly scene plays out. Black Lives Matter protestors are demonstrating around the stadium. It is playoff baseball, the Cardinals are entering Game 3 at home against the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Best Fans in Baseball are filing toward the stadium, but can’t help from verbally sparring with the BLM activists. They say things like if they were working this wouldn’t be a problem, they make veiled threats like if they “saw me in the streets” they’d “look at the ground.” Another Best Fan tells the protestors they should be thankful for the freedoms white people gave them. A woman chants “Africa! Africa!” another tells them to pull up their pants. The fans begin chanting “Let’s Go Cardinals” to drown out Black Lives Matter, eventually changing to “Let’s go Darren!” before settling on “USA! USA! USA!” 

The Post-Dispatch didn’t report this story the next day, or the day after, or the day after that. The only thing they cared about was a front page photo of Kolten Wong celebrating a go-ahead 2-run homer in the bottom of the 7th. Much like what you’re about to learn what happened in Leonardtown, it’s kinda like people just wanted this sort of thing to go away.

I wonder if Jack Flaherty saw that? Or if someone brought this to his attention almost six years later. 

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A police expert described the investigation into Ham’s death as C.(over)Y.(our)A.(ss). Despite Barracks T having the highest use of force since 2017, State Attorney Richard Fritz decided to let the Maryland State Police investigate one of their own officers before making a decision if he’d bring charges against Azzari. Fritz, who we’ll talk about later, was ramping up for a re-election campaign.

There are a few key witnesses that saw the whole thing expired. Victoria Boyle and Michelle and Allison Mills. Victoria Boyle had run out of her guest house to plead for her grandson’s life. The Mills watched from their home–a view clear enough to take a picture–as Peyton Ham knelt to his knees, bleeding, in their gravel driveway. Another witness, Jean Combs–whose garage Azzari shot up–overheard arguing before someone shouted “FUCK YOU” before the first salvo of gunfire. 

Police did not call any of those people to the station for a video interview. Victoria Boyle recalls police interrogating her for hours and trying to lead her to believe things she did not see. She reiterates what she and the Mills saw, even against police pressure, that Peyton Ham was in no way a threat to Joseph Azzari when he died.

The Police line is that Ham stood, knife in hand, and charged Azzari who killed him. What the Mills and Victoria Boyle say is quite different, in fact so different it changes the complexities of a justifiable homicide into straight-up homicide. And police are the good guys, right? Something like that could erode public trust, so they immediately went into damage control and told the 80 something grandmother of a murdered boy that Peyton charged at Azzari, and they had corroborating testimony to back that up.

“The first time the detectives threw that at me, it was, ‘What would you say…if I told you we had witnesses that saw Peyton lunged?’ But I said, ‘I don’t know who your witnesses are but there was no lunge, nothing that could even be perceived as a lunge.’ It wasn’t possible. It didn’t happen.”

The police interviewed the Mills at their residence about what happened, but according to Michelle and Allison their interviews were doctored when Fritz’s report came out. Even after giving written testimony to the police and state attorney’s office, as well as testifying in front of a grand jury, they say that Fritz’s report was full of fabrications. Neither Victoria Boyle nor the Mills were listed as witnesses that exonerated Azzari. The lone police witness was a woman named Patricia W. who claimed she drove by before the shooting occurred. Her testimony includes seeing the “very angry” look on Ham’s face, as well as the “calm” demeanor of Azzari. Michelle Mills would like to point out that it seems very far-fetched for someone driving 40 mph on a road could see such expressions, that this police-provided witness did not see the shooting actually occur, and that Ham’s back would have been turned to the road.

When asked by Dave McKenna if Peyton Ham was walking toward Azzari when he was killed she says that it didn’t happen.

“Peyton was murdered in my driveway,” she says.

There’s more inconsistencies provided by the police. Peyton Ham was killed for holding a toy gun, they stated, a replica Sig Sauer. The photo they released of the weapon, turns out, was not the actual weapon but a stock photo. When pressed why they would do that they said because the actual gun had blood on it. 

There may not be a gun, actually. By law, Maryland State Police provided Michelle Mills with a list of items removed from her property during the search after the shooting. They took the 15 shell casings, Ham’s shorts, and sandals, but did not mention a gun. In Fritz’s report he states that Ham released the gun, however it is not elaborated where this gun is currently at, or if Azzari picked it up. 

After Ham dropped to his knees, Azzari stated he moved to render medical aid to Ham. The Mills say that’s a lie, and that Azzari pointed his gun at him. After Ham was shot a second time, police doubled down saying they gave the boy medical assistance, but the Mills say that is also a lie. Body camera footage from an arriving officer doesn’t back that up, instead the body cam shows a high school student lying in a pool of his own blood in agonal gasps. 

You might be asking yourself why there’s a body camera now and not earlier. Prior to the passage of a police reform bill, the state of Maryland didn’t require officers to wear body cameras. Wearing one was optional. Azzari’s dash-cam was also not recording, because he arrived on scene with no sirens or lights, which automatically triggers recording. Nor did Azzari decide to manually record the encounter with his dash-cam. 

That’s another detail that the prosecution and the state police failed to account for when they did all this. How come all the blood is one spot? Michelle Mills pointed this out to reporters for the Washington Post and Defector. She points to the ground and says, “You can see all the blood pooled in this one area. So you could tell he wasn’t moving when this happened. Peyton wasn’t getting up and moving. He was in that same spot the entire time.”

Maryland State Police, in conjunction with Richard Fritz’s attorney office, failed to be transparent in their investigation with, not only the parties involved, but the public. When pressed under an FOIA request for the 911 records and body cam footage, they denied access because Peyton was a juvenile, meaning that those records could not be released. However, a Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press attorney says that that does not apply here, since that exception was written to protect minors, and not the people who kill them.

When they were not denying FOIA requests, the police and state attorney were denying other requests, like the autopsy report. Peyton’s step-father, Mike Boyle, hounded Fritz’s office for the autopsy report, only to be shot down with the excuse of it being tied to an ongoing investigation. Eventually, Boyle was provided a “document dump” of police records, as well as a partial autopsy, from a sympathetic staffer at the Sheriff’s department. The autopsy shows that the final burst of rounds from Trooper Azzari struck Peyton and continued downward before exiting his back. This downward trajectory on a boy five to six inches taller than the trooper indicates that he was not shot while standing. In autopsy records obtained by the Baltimore Sun, they found that the first burst from Azzari had entered Peyton Ham and traveled upward. 

Both the state police and state attorney provided no explanation or even a theory about this. 

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Richard Fritz was the state attorney for St. Mary’s County. He won election in 1998 and served until his defeat to Jaymi Sterling this past year. For over twenty years he bumbled and intimidated his way into power and maintained it. It’s kind of perplexing when you dive into who he is.

Richard Fritz, along with two others, raped Carla Henning-Bailey in 1964. Fritz was 18 at the time and Henning-Bailey a sophomore new to the school. Fritz took her to a party on Saint George’s Island where he, another classmate, and a 23 year-old raped her. 

This wasn’t an incident of non-reporting, something that victims of sexual assault do–or do not do–all the time. This is mainly out of the trauma of reliving the entire assault all over again, as well as the failures of cops to take them seriously. Henning-Bailey went to the police, who arrested Fritz. However in small rural communities the “who you know” aspect outweighs the meaningful justice one, and Fritz pled down to a charge of carnal knowledge with a female child. He was initially sentenced to 18 months, but that sentence was suspended and reduced to probation. Carla Henning-Bailey and her family left the state and moved to Pennsylvania to try and rebuild, Richard Fritz began a career that would thrust him into politics.

There’s so much awfulness to Richard Fritz. In the 1980s he was a public defender, and in one case switched sides on his client and joined the prosecution. I’ll repeat that again for you. The attorney provided by the state to defend a man of a crime, swapped teams to put him away. When this was pointed out how ridiculous and unethical it was–keep in my mind, what better person to provide information that may damage your defense than your own attorney–the state of Maryland didn’t care and Fritz’s ex-client was indicted, charged, and imprisoned anyway.

In the early 90s Fritz resigned because he kept going on raids with other police officers, directly inserting himself into the alleged crimes of the people he would have to decide to charge or not. This bizarre behavior didn’t stop him, he ran as a democrat in 1994 against his former boss and lost. He switched parties and challenged for the state attorney’s job again in 1998 where he won. But he did so in a unique fashion.

For one, Carl Henning-Bailey noticed that Richard Fritz was still around and moving into positions with more and more power. She came forward to St. Mary’s Today, a local newspaper owned by Ken Rossignol, about her sexual assault at the hands of Fritz. The editor of the paper deeply resented Richard, and decided to run the story, he would drop that story right before election day with the headline “Fritz Guilty of Rape.” Fritz recruited six sheriff’s deputies to go and buy up all copies of this edition–at least 1,600 in total–and store them at a barn on one of his family properties. This became national news for a time, but didn’t affect Richard Fritz winning the election. He tripled down on his story, telling ABC’s Chris Wallace that everything was consensual, even when Wallace pressed him as to why a 15 year-old girl would want to have consensual sex with 3 men, Fritz just went with it and said, “Happens all the time.” Despite all the backlash and even having to pay out a $435,000 settlement to Rossignol, Fritz kept chugging along.

In 2009 he learned that local lawyer John A. Mattingly Jr. would challenge him in 2010 for his seat. So Fritz worked with the sheriff’s office to trump up charges over some real estate deals Mattingly Jr. had done, and in September 2009 raided his home and indicted him on 140 counts of fraud, forgery, and witness tampering. This hilarious breach of power was clearly noted, and the investigation was taken out of Fritz’s hands and turned over to an outside prosecutor from Prince George’s County, who noticed that Fritz’s office had failed to turn over all the evidence to Mattingly Jr’s legal team, because that evidence proved his innocence. This actual prosecutor dropped all charges and lit up Fritz, who said she “took a dive” and compared his political opponent to OJ Simpson. Fritz never apologized and faced no repercussions, John A. Mattingly Jr. and his campaign went bankrupt.

Oh and this isn’t the first time Richard Fritz allowed children to be hurt. In 2019 an elementary school teacher named Theodore Bell was charged for child molestation. Bell’s history of sex abuse against minors stretches back to the 1970s after another victim came forward during this investigation. Bell even admitted to “touching boys inappropriately”, but Richard Fritz and his team saw otherwise. Fritz took on the case personally, and worked out a plea deal to have Bell charged with second degree assault, a misdemeanor. Judge Michael Stamm was, reasonably, uncomfortable about this and said no plea, that Bell would have to go to trial. One of the victims lit into Fritz about this during the hearing, and, whether out of incompetence or personal vendetta, Fritz quietly dropped all charges against a confessed child molestor. His reason? It didn’t make sense to incarcerate a feeble 73 year-old man, and that the jury may not believe some of the victims because of how long it took for them to report the abuse.

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The deputy attorney assigned to Ham’s case was Dan White. Fritz picked him because he wanted all this to go away. No one with any power bothered to point out that this was a conflict of interest. Dan White had two brothers who were state troopers, one of them was a superintendent for the Leonardtown Barracks. He had a nephew was a state trooper. In March 2022 Dan and his brother Michael were named in a massive federal civil suit over embezzlement and stealing company secrets. The case was also sent to the Maryland State Prosecutor for further investigation into criminal charges.

Ham’s family members–the Raleys and Boyles–never let up on Dan White’s office. They didn’t want to be too public in their frustrations, they believed in the system. A family friend who was a retired cop was a pallbearer at Peyton’s funeral. Police are good guys, right? But their questions became tedious and White directed his receptionist to stop taking their calls. 

When the powers weren’t too busy ignoring the pleas of a family whose son was killed, they devoted energy to portraying a 16 year-old as deeply troubled. The police and Fritz’s office would lead you to believe that Peyton Ham died by cop-suicide, that text messages and emails from his computer indicated that his recent slip in school drove him to call the MSP and bring Joseph Azzari out to shoot him. In Fritz’s report they refer to Azzari as “The Victim” and asserts that Ham harbored “multiple anti-authority/government items” referring to an item being the book Dead Or Alive a 2010 Tom Clancy novel. In late October 2021 Fritz’s office stated they would not bring charges against Azzari.

Kristee Boyle filed a $10 million lawsuit against Azzari on April 12, 2022 for violating Ham’s constitutional rights while killing him. The charges in the civil suit are for excessive force, assault, battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and punitive damages. 11 days ago as of writing this, US District Court judge George J. Hazel–an Obama appointed judge–who is set to retire in February, dismissed the Boyle’s case against the man for killing her son.

During this time, former deputy attorney under Fritz, Jaymi Sterling, announced her candidacy to usurp the entrenched Fritz. Sterling was one of numerous employees under Fritz that aired their grievances over his practices. After the botched Mattingly Jr. case, three prosecutors resigned over how Fritz conducted it. Another, Barbara Rivera, resigned a few years ago over Fritz taking public funds for Project Graduation and awarding an employee a $25,000 bonus. Rivera, who served St. Mary’s County for 21 years, questioned why Fritz would give this bonus to a less tenured employee–the employee, Dena Womack, had worked for the office for 4 years. When she brought this to her boss’s attention he told her “maybe you should have bitched more.” Rivera filed a complaint against Fritz, who demoted Womack in office in front of her co-workers. 

Like he did with Mattingly Jr., Fritz attempted to intimidate Jaymi Sterling. He had photos scrubbed of her from the County’s Facebook page, and he re-litigated some of her old cases. He issued a subpoena for her, having her served while at home. This made her private address of public record, a doxxing attempt. Sterling would successfully have her address expunged from court documents.

The ensuing election was a bloodbath for Fritz, who lost by 50 points against Sterling. In defeat Fritz said that the margin was clear that there was time for change. Months before her victory speech, Jaymi Sterling’s father, Governor Larry Hogan, shot down three police reform bills, one of them requiring officers to wear body cameras–body cameras that could have provided closure and justice to Kristee, Mike, and Victoria Boyle, Keith, Kellee, and Brenda Raley, and Michelle and Allison Mills–but the Maryland State Assembly overrode Hogan’s vetoes. Sometime this year, Maryland police officers will be equipped with body cameras. 

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Writing and recording this made me physically ill and angry–because I know that if this can happen in a conservative community to white kids, imagine how bad it is for black or Hispanic ones. Days after her civil suit was dismissed, Kristee Boyle’s facebook fell silent and has remained so. Her husband, Mike, 17 years older is still stuck in my mind. He bolted from work and was met by a wall of police cruisers blocking off Hollywood Road. He was reported as screaming, “I need to know. I need to know if it’s my son!”

You never really understand what someone is going through. When presented with the theory that Peyton committed suicide by cop, Kristee Boyle was flabbergasted. She said they would have moved mountains for her son, that nothing in his behavior stood out to her as a crisis. At that time Peyton was behind on some of his virtual homework, but he was nowhere near failing. The day before he died, he was watching movies with his grandparents and playing with their dogs. The only person who could’ve helped Kristee and Mike Boyle understand whatever crises Peyton was possibly going through was Joseph Azzari, but he decided to kill their son instead.

Peyton’s family wanted everyone to know his story, and they didn’t give up. They held marches and protests for him, they were backed by BLM and NAACP adjacent groups. It’s the kind of thing that’s always glossed over when a white kid is murdered by a cop, that shared grief and oppression between racial lines. When critics harp on Jack Flaherty, or Bruce Maxwell, or LeBron James, or Colin Kaepernick for Black Lives Matter they’re ignoring that BLM is fighting against state violence and oppression against everyone.

He was such a good kid, man. When I taught sophomore world history I could have seen this boy in my class, I could see dozens of Peyton Hams. Nobody wanted him to die that day, except for one person. 

And here’s where we come back to the point we’ve been beating around for the last half hour or so. The police lie. The police misconstrue or mislead. The police make up stories about who you are because you had a novel in your room, or that you wanted to die because you were behind on your homework. They won’t take you seriously, they’ll ignore you and your family. They won’t investigate you if it hurts their image like Carla Henning-Bailey. They work hand-in-hand with prosecutors to protect themselves–they work with their blessing–they will cover for one another no matter the human cost, no matter how many Mike Boyles scream for their kid as he’s gasping in agony and dying from hypoxia. The police will let anyone walk if it helps their image, career, or personal grudge. They will put their knee on your neck and suffocate you, they will break your neck and throw you in a police van and do nothing to help you. They will tell mothers like Kristee Boyle that their kid was a threat, and then shoot them multiple times when they’re on their knees covered in blood. They will scratch and claw to maintain whatever power suits them, and they will kill you and your children.