Until recently, Brandon Reed Loverde, one of Orlando’s “Finest,” was making $40 an hour to provide security for rhe Firestone Live club. Although off-duty, he would wear his government-issued costume, and presumably was also clothed in the necessary “authority” to arrest and otherwise abuse people as he saw fit.
That latter fact explains why he was able to detain and sexually assault 20-year-old nursing mother Rachelle Cortez after she was thrown out of the club for dancing too close to the stage.
Loverde ordered Cortez “to follow him into a parking lot at the rear of a nearby business and made her sit on the ground,” reports the Orlando Sentinel. He confiscated her cell phone and identification and left briefly, presumably to run a background check.
When he returned he had a blue latex glove on his right hand. “He then squatted in front of her, reached inside her bra and squeezed her right breast until milk squirted into his glove,” while commenting to the horrified young mother that he wanted to “suck on them.'”
This event was captured on surveillance video. After being charged with battery and with false imprisonment with a weapon, Loverde was booked into jail and then released after posting $5,500 bail. It’s doubtful that a Mundane would be given such lenient bail were he accused of assaulting a police officer (for one thing, the offense wouldn’t be described in such minimal terms: prosecutors tend to multiply charges whenever a commoner lifts an unhallowed hand against one of the State’s sanctified enforcers).
Elsewhere along the heroic Thin Blue Line:
*Fredericktown, Missouri Police Captain Kenneth Tomlinson, 42, faces 16 counts of sexual misconduct involving at least three teenage boys.
*Trying to subdue what amounts to a crime wave in the county police department, the Board of Commissioners for Georgia’s Clayton County has voted to remove police chief Jeff Turner. The complaints sustained against Turner’s department included numerous acts of sexual misconduct; one of his officers was arrested by federal authorities for sexual enticement of a minor.
*Last September, Michael Meissner, the 39-year-old chief of Little River-Academy (a small Texas community south of Waco) was arrested on sexual misconduct charges; the long and detailed arrest affidavit contained numerous explicit excerpts from text messages he had sent to teenage boys “trying to lure them to sex parties,” reports the Dallas Morning News.
Without explanation, the prosecutors “erased” the charges against Meissner, which included promotion of child prostitution and sexual performance of a child.
The former police chief contends that the case was contrived by investigating officer John Hoskins of the nearby Combine Police Department, who supposedly has a “vendetta” against him.
Meissner, who has been employed by 18 different police agencies during the past twenty years, has had a lengthy feud with Hoskins, who is (in the Morning News‘s delicate phrase) “an equally nomadic officer.”
Prior to being hired as police chief at Little River-Academy, Meissner had been arrested at least four times for (among other things) witness tampering and attempted fraud (by claiming a fictitious degree in a job application with the Dallas Community College District).
The conflict between Meissner and Hoskins began in 2006, after Hoskins investigated allegations that Meissner had used a department computer to watch pornography with a 15-year-old boy.
These stories offer an interesting counterpoint to a recent “Bless the Badge” ceremony in Columbus, Ohio sponsored by Central Ohio Crime Stoppers. Pastors from several local churches participated in the event, during which one of them prayed that the badge would be “a heavenly protection” for those who wear it.
Who is going to protect nursing mothers and vulnerable youngsters from the predatory attentions of Officer A-Little-Too Friendly?
10:05 am on January 8, 2010
