With the all the layoffs and cutbacks going on at the Orange County Register, it's nice to know that one thing hasn't changed: the crazy shit being written by Gordon “Boot-Licker” Dillow, whose love for combat veterans is matched only by his love for cops who shoot teenage girls armed with penknives and beat the crap out of handcuffed inmates.
The latest evidence? Dillow's typically fawning column from this morning's paper, “Jailers On Tape Needn't Apologize.”
In his column, Dillow defends sheriff deputies who filmed themselves subduing Matthew Fleuret, an intoxicated bar patron who got busted last year for celebrating St. Patrick's Day the Irish way: participating in a good old fashioned donneybrook, a bar fight, if you will. (Nobody pressed charges in the fight, but all the participants were booked anyways.) The 24-minute tape shot by deputies is now evidence in a federal civil rights case Fleuret has filed against the Sheriff's department. The tape shows deputies struggling to handcuff Fleuret to a restraining chair, shocking him with a Taser nearly a dozen times and sticking a knee in his back.
According to Dillow, the tape “shows an aspect of police work that is often necessary…despite what some money-chasing lawyers and naive journalists try to tell you, as long as there are drunken and childish and deranged and violent people in this world, it always will be.”
Wow, we didn't realize the deputies were drunk, too! Oh wait, he's talking about the drunk guy who acted “deranged” and “violent” seeing as how the tape shows him shouting obscenities at the deputies who were Tasing him, thereby assaulting their fragile egos.
Dillow's love affair with Tasers seems to have started in the aftermath of the November 2006 shooting of Ashley MacDonald, a suicidal teenager shot 18 times by a pair of Huntington Beach police officers after they confronted her standing in the middle of an empty park waving a penknife. Dillow opined that anyone who felt the cops should have used Tasers was misguided, since the cops would probably have been sued for doing that.
Well, as the Fleuret case seems to show, he's probably right on that score, but an there's at least one petite young female who'd still be alive.
Award-winning investigative journalist Nick Schou is Editor of OC Weekly. He is the author of Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb (Nation Books 2006), which provided the basis for the 2014 Focus Features release starring Jeremy Renner and the L.A. Times-bestseller Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Quest to bring Peace, Love and Acid to the World, (Thomas Dunne 2009). He is also the author of The Weed Runners (2013) and Spooked: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Hoodwinks Hollywood (2016).