Ex-Bears GM Jerry Angelo says the NFL ignord hundres of cases of domestic violen

Ha. Good one. You haven't been paying attention at all.

Check out the other thread. 20 San Jose cops on 49ers' payroll.

 

I totally agree with this.

Are we really so naive as to think this stuff didn't go on in the 60s, 70s and 80s? It's just that with the 24-hour news cycle, all the off the field stuff comes under much greater scrutiny.

I'm sure back 30-40 years ago, it was much easier for teams to handle things in house and/or sweep it under the rug. But I have no doubt it happened.

 

The fix is always in. Everybody who is accused of a crime is always guilty. Don't you all know that?

 

Not anymore.

Police suspends officers' off-duty work with 49ers
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — The San Jose Police Department has informed its officers they are no longer allowed to do off-duty work for the San Francisco 49ers.
The order Friday came hours after the San Jose Mercury News reported a sergeant with the San Jose Police Department allegedly was at Ray McDonald's house the day he was arrested for domestic violence.
The officer is one of 16 from the department who moonlight with the 49ers as part of the team's security.
San Jose Police Chief Larry Esquivel says in a message to personnel that it is in the department's "best interest to suspend all San Francisco 49er secondary employment related assignments until further notice."
Esquivel says the decision was made "due to the complexities of the investigation."
McDonald is out on $25,000 bail following his Aug. 31 arrest.

 

Wow. That's big.

I hope protecting Ray was worth the millions of dollars they will collectively lose over the next few years!

 

I have no doubt whatsoever that the league has hushed up or swept under the rug any number of incidents over the years. It is well known that league security employs many ex-cops, and that it cultivates relationships with members of law enforcement. Cops are no more immune to playing fanboy than other people are. Every day policemen make decisions about how to handle incidents they see. If they don't like you, if you carry yourself wrong or say the wrong thing, the charges from the same incident can be radically different from what you'd face if you were on their good side. Add in money and access to lucrative part time jobs, or jobs after retirement, and the league wields powerful influence.

The other side of the coin is that society today is far different, and far less tolerant of words and actions that used to be routine. The simple fact that we refer to "the N word" and that the use of that word has become anathema in polite society tells us that. I can remember when use of that word was not uncommon, although considered vulgar and impolite.

Society's view of violence against women, wife beating, has come a long way as well. I don't remember what led me to look at Youtube for Hunter S. Thompson a while back, but I hit a clip of him interviewed along with a Hell's Angel after his book on the Angels came out. It runs about 6 1/2 minutes, but the meat of what applies here starts at about 3:25.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyu44rsaZo

The Angel says, in reference to another Angel beating his wife, "To keep a woman in line you got to beat them like a rug once in a while", and the audience, including the women in the audience, laugh. No one seems offended. It was said as a funny throwaway line, but context says that he absolutely meant what he said, and the crowd seems to have taken it that way, and they don't bat an eye. The interview was from 1967.

I'm sure that Angelo's "hundreds over thirty years" was in part informed by the attitudes of a bygone era. On the other hand, he has not been out of the game all that long.

 

It would have been so easy to push these cases aside up until very, very recently.

I was watching the SEC Network and they were interviewing Will Muschamp about the Treon Harris issue and the victim apparently withdrew her claim, probably after being bribed or threatened, and he's talking like Harris was completely cleared.

It's like that everywhere. Get accused of someting, work out a plea arrangement where you plead no contest or agree to get counseling and it all goes away. It didn't always happen like that, but in the majority of cases it did.