Their best interests don't always line up, but it helps neither side if there is reasonable doubt. The officer has much more to lose but the Politician has his department look like hell. The Sean Bell case and Malice Green had race as a factor, I believe Al Sharpton was all over both from the start. If race is thrown in the mix the media and general public have already condemned the accused. Regardless if it is an officer or Duke Lacross players.
In this case the Sheriff had nothing to gain by throwing the Deputy under the bus. Besides having more to deal with he would have lost any support from his own department.
I mentioned those two instances because they're more recognizable to people on a national level, but there are many cases that don't make much news where cops get strung up by their bosses when they didn't do anything wrong. Cases like CBP agents Compean & Ramos made some news because they got stuck with criminal charges and hard time in prison, but there's many other kinds of sanctions that a cop can recieve that don't involve the courts like that.
Even in 100% justified shootings, the cops involved get bombarded with phone calls at work & at home from people around the country calling them a killer/murderer/jack booted thug, have friends/relatives of the person they shot attack them and their family at their home
, and get their shooting reported in news stories that cleverly don't say what they did was wrong, but leave people with the impression that something dirty happened, or that mangle the details when they "report" them which stirs up controversy. I can name (but I won't on a public forum) three different cops in Mass. who went through this stuff and more as the result of three separate clean shootings. In all three of those cases the agencies had those cop's backs and stood up for them, but there's many others where this doesn't happen.
There's also chiefs/sheriffs (like the well-known Joe Arpaio) who don't give a crap about support from their staff, or who want to give the impression that they're tough on dirty cops, so they pretend that the cops did something wrong when talking to the media even when they're clean.
But there are cases of lieutenant supporting their direct reports, too far sometimes like the N.O. bridge shooting.
I agree, and that's wrong & disguting too, but in a different way than what I was talking about above. The difference is that a department doing wrong in a case like the NOLA bridge shooting sells newspapers and people remember it because it gets brought to light. From what I've seen those dept. lies are much less common than the other kind, but they come out a lot more because the system works for the most part.
I am not saying that I agree with it but blaming the Department chief/Sherriff for a media explosion that has already taken place?
The officers were already under the bus, the chief, the union and the entire Department couldn’t have pulled them out at that point.
In both the Malice Green & Sean Bell incidents the media was told that the officers had done wrong and were being investigated before any details had even emerged. The media freaked that black felons were killed by cops (in some cases by other minority cops), but the one's in charge added fuel to the fire based on the media frenzy and nothing else.
Something similar happened in
the LAPD shooting of Devin Brown, the "unarmed" kid who got shot while trying to kill a cop. The officer involved did no wrong, but got no support from his dept. (read some of those quotes from the statements to the media). However, the shooting was completely justified, and
the DA's investigation into the shooting found that everything matched up, it was a clean shoot. Even still, after that shooting
LAPD changed their department policy, saying that cops on their department aren't allowed to shoot at vehicles anymore unless the officer is in danger
from an object other than the vehicle, further implying that the shoot was bad.
This is not a rare event in the modern, PC world of police use of force.
Rodney King even went to the federal level, not because of the department chief did or the local politicians but because of the liberal media. Those officers were sacrificed by the federal government because of the media.
The Chief/Sheriff is doing damage reduction at this point. One way or another reducing the public outcry helps the officer. You want to call it throwing the officers under the bus go ahead but don’t ignore your real enemy for a convenient one. If the media headline was cops arrest drunk crack addict who assaulted officers Rodney King would not have caused riots.
The media is definitely an enemy when it comes to use of force issues (both police, civilian and military) IMO, even in the Rodney King case, which is a whole separate topic. But LAPD higher ups lied & covered things up in the Rodney King incident to make the officers look worse, and to throw them under the bus. The department also put rookie Susan Clemmer through the wringer when she refused to change her testimony regarding what happened that night.
The media does most honest cops and soldiers a disservice when it comes to many shootings, but believe me when I tell you that police agencies don't just rapidly form a thin blue line to protect one of their own when something like this happens.