A Saratoga County sheriff’s sergeant has been suspended without pay as an internal investigation is being conducted for what appears to be yet another instance of a bully with a badge.
Via New York Magazine:
The latest installment in this seemingly endless series comes from Saratoga, New York, where a man secretly filmed his encounter with 48-year-old Sgt. Shawn R. Glans in a parking lot on Friday.
According to the Albany Times-Union, Glans confronted the videographer and his friend because he noticed a .22-caliber rifle in the backseat of their car. In the video, Glans becomes increasingly angry and abusive because the pair refuses his demand to search the vehicle. “We’ll get a fucking search warrant,” Glans tells the friend, who calmly insists that there’s no need for a search. “Fucking idiot,” Glans responds. “Give me your fucking keys … I’m searching your fucking car.”
“You gonna fucking resist?” Glans asks as he approaches the man, whose “I’m not resisting” is met with a slap. When the videographer remarks on the “intensity” of the situation, Glans promises that he can get “a lot more intense.” For example, he’ll “rip your fucking head off and shit down your neck.”
Glans reportedly let the men go after they showed him a receipt for the gun. But after some people at the Saratoga sheriff’s office got a look at the footage, he was suspended without pay. Reached by the Times-Union, Glans admitted that the video “doesn’t look good.”
In a vague justification statement, Glans told the Albany Times-Union that he was simply doing in his job on what he perceived to be a testy situation. “I was concerned. It was a public safety issue,” he said. “If I had to do it all over again … I’d probably do the same thing. If I knew the camera was there, no, because it does look bad.”
The sheriff’s released a statement that spoke the complete opposite which read, “The Sheriff’s Office takes matters such as this very seriously and does not in any way condone anything less than professional behavior from our members. Sheriff’s wish to thank the members of the community who brought this to light and cooperated fully with the investigation.”
Watch the volatile video from the New York sheriff in the YouTube player below.
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Photo: YouTube
