A cell-phone video has captured yet another cop acting like a power-tripping maniac. 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.”
“I was concerned. It was a public safety issue,” he continued. “If I had to do it all over again, I’d probably do the same thing” — if he knew he wouldn’t get caught, that is. “If I knew the camera was there, [I wouldn’t], because it does look bad,” Glans explained. Advocates of police body cameras couldn’t have put it any better themselves.
