An autograph -- and a tweet -- from Ray Rice may end up getting a Baltimore police officer in trouble.
We noted last week that Rice, the Ravens’ running back, tweeted that he had given an autograph to a cop who pulled him over, and that the cop let him go without a ticket. Rice later claimed that he only gave the autograph to the officer after the officer had already decided to let him go with a warning.
But Baltimore County Police Chief James W. Johnson told the Baltimore Sun on Thursday that he would not rule out disciplinary action for the officer even though internal affairs detectives recommended the officer be cleared.
Johnson said he has ethics experts from universities advising him on the issue, and he wants to think carefully about whether this is no big deal, or whether it exposes a serious problem with celebrities getting special treatment.
“This is not a closed matter,” Johnson said. “This is one of those cases that we need to step back on and slowly deliberate.”
Although this seems rather trivial in the grand scheme of things that the police in Baltimore need to be concerned with (at least from what I know by watching The Wire), Johnson deserves credit for dealing publicly with an incident that it would have been easy to sweep under the rug.