The thin blue unemployment line

Like the rest of our nation, police commissions and courts are sensitive to complaints of excessive use of police force and often discipline those who commit it and those who observe it without reporting. In the following case, the court evaluated the termination of a prison guard with a spotless reputation who observed and failed to report another guard's assault on an inmate because she felt compelled to comply with the code of silence.

Inmate's off-the-record punishment

Meghan Pasos began working as a deputy sheriff at Los Angeles County's Men's Central Jail in November 2007. She was one of five deputies assigned to a floor that housed 1,200 inmates. In 2010, commissary employee Anna Garcia told Pasos, Deputy Omar Lopez, and Deputy Mark Montez that an inmate she identified as Dequan Ballard had stolen a bag of food from the canteen. Lopez took Ballard to the elevator landing area outside the view of surveillance cameras and roughly searched him, finding the bag of food during the search. Ballard admitted to stealing the bag, and Lopez sent him back to his dormitory.