1y ago

Colorado officials reach $8.5 million settlement with woman who was left handcuffed in a police car that was hit by a train

www.cnn.com

Colorado officials reach $8.5 million settlement with woman who was left handcuffed in a police car that was hit by a train | CNN

Local Colorado officials have reached an $8.5 million settlement with a woman who was hospitalized in 2022 after being left handcuffed in a police SUV that was then hit by a train.

The city of Fort Lupton and town of Platteville, Colorado, agreed on the settlement with the victim, Yareni Rios-Gonzalez, according to a release from the Fort Lupton Police Department. The settlement amount will be split equally between the town and city and paid by their insurers, according to attorney Eric M. Ziporin, whose office represents the city.

Rios, who was a suspect in a road rage case, survived the September 2022 collision but suffered nine broken ribs, a broken arm and other injuries.

50 comments

It's awesome we are finally holding the police financially liable for their actions. My bad, it's the taxpayers again.
You want change? Demand police accountability.
- Police aren't civilians and they aren't workers. Abolish their "union" as well as Qualified Immunity. They can earn the right to not be prosecuted while doing their job...
  
  Police are supposed to be civilians. The whole idea of America avoiding mitary dictatorship was vested in the Army being under the control of the Commander in Chief (a civilian chosen by civilians), In conjunction with the police force being comprised of civilians, otherwise that force is just a military with a different name. You can make the argument they're above civilians in current times but this is by no mean integral to american policing, and is in fact antithetical to the American idea of police.
  Don't get me wrong I still think they're problematic even in the theoretical best case scenario, but they're definitely civilians. Know you enemy, know them well.
  
  Or take settlement money out of police pension funds.
  
  Police absolutely ARE CIVILIANS
  
  So many people are anti-union but when it comes to the police union they're oddly silent...
  
  Cops don't have qualified immunity in Colorado
- 30 months of probation?! That’s basically a slap on the wrist. That’s not accountability, that’s doing the absolute minimum to make it LOOK like “see, we’re accountable!”. Dude handcuffed a person in a car on railroad tracks.
  
  Did you read the post you replied to? They said financially liable. Read through the quote you responded with and tell us where they are held financially liable. They are (rightfully) mad that it's the taxpayers that are effectively paying out the settlement instead of the police force.
  
  The settlement amount will be split equally between the town and city and paid by their insurers, according to attorney Eric M. Ziporin, whose office represents the city.
  Perhaps you should read it.
  
  I guess that's technically accountability. Doesn't sound like much of a punishment.
  And this is damn near a unicorn. (and likely would have been swept under the rug without cam footage - just like every other case where cops see justice) Just like one black president didn't signal the end of racism, a small percentage of cases where someone OTHER THAN taxpayers are on the hook for police misbehavior doesn't signal the end of a need for reform, it signals a nearly imperceptible change to the status quo. I'm grateful for the change, but it's barely a start.
The weird thing is this cop didn't put the suspect in her own car, but another officer's car who had parked on the tracks.
First off, what kind of fucking moron parks their car on fucking train tracks? Holy shit, that guy should have been punished as much as the officer who put the suspect in the car just for being so goddamn stupid.
Secondly, the cop should have noticed that the car she put the suspect in was on the tracks. She probably assumed the car was a safe place to put a person, since you would think nobody would be so stupid as to park on the tracks.
- First off, what kind of fucking moron parks their car on fucking train tracks?
  A cop that wants to execute someone via train.
  
  The cop who parked there isn't the cop who put the suspect in the car.
Parked the vehicle on the tracks!! Wtf?!
- That's one of the top, like, three things you're told not to do with a car.
  
  But one of the top things you might do if you were an immoral bully who was immune from criminal prosecution.
- To be fair, the former cop who did this isn't the one who parked the car there. She just placed the suspect into the closest cop car, which happened to be on the tracks. I still think she should be liable for putting someone in that situation, but it's not as bad as her parking on the tracks and then putting a person in a car she knew was on the tracks. Yeah, she should have noticed the car was on the tracks, but she didn't park it there and might have assumed nobody would be so fucking stupid as to park on the tracks.
  
  Does her capacity to assume nobody would be that stupid somehow preclude her from seeing that the car was on the train tracks?
  Even in the dark, it's pretty noticeable when you're on even the paved part of train tracks that cross a road. I don't really understand how she couldn't have realized where the car was parked by sight or by feel while putting the suspect into the back seat.
  
  Not sure why her level of assumption abojt whether cars would be on tracks would matter, if the tracks aren’t visually obscured or something.
  One might assume there’d never be a volcano in Idaho, but when you toss a baby into the volcano you found in Idaho it doesn’t really matter what you would have assumed.
I think all of you claiming this was intentional need to remember Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Are cops evil bastards? Yes. But they also don't need to come up with something this convoluted to kill someone they want dead. On the other hand, there are demonstrably a ton of very stupid cops.
Real mustache twirling villian energy here.

50 comments