SUD of the Week: Who Knew Being a Clumsy Lying Cop Could End you in Jail?

SEEMINGLY UNIMPORTANT DECISION of the Week: Who Knew Being a Clumsy Lying Cop Could End you in Jail?

Stenroos, a clumsy idiot and a cowardly liar - god bless.

Last January, Jeffrey Stenroos, LA Unified School District police officer, claimed he’d been shot just outside a local school. This led to a massive 10-hour manhunt, 550 cops, choppers, dogs, the whole 9 yards. Schools were shut down, people were panicked. The total cost to the city and schools was around $400,000. Then Jeffrey’s story started breaking down. The sketch released, the details, all of it started to sound a bit fishy. Finally the 31-year-old glorified rent-a-cop admitted the ugly truth – he accidentally shot himself with his own gun and made up the whole story to cover for the embarrassment of it all.

Here it is, just another example of something that’s plagued man since the beginning of time but seems to be increasing in popularity ever since tricky Dick Nixon almost got away with it. It’s this wormy little weasel’s attitude of trying to cover up one’s fuck-ups instead of facing the truth, of acting like a little boy lying about how the lamp broke instead of being a man and admitting your weakness. Bet he sat in the hospital feeling ashamed but with every passing minute felt like he’d be okay. Maybe even cracked a beer, bragged to his buddies about it. Or just prayed that he’d get away with it, a criminal who cost the city almost half a million dollars because he was too cowardly and weak to admit he’s probably a shitty cop.

This last week he was sentenced to 5 years. It’s been reduced to 2 years but basically he’s an officer of the law looking at serving some hard time and being release without any viable job experience to speak of. He wasn’t even a street hustler, which could lead to a sales job, or an overly-abusive cop, which could at least get him a gig doing mall security. Nope, for his ineptitude and the lie he told to try and hide it, a certainly seemingly small lie that grew to a FUGITIVE-style manhunt, he’s going to prison without any hope of a decent foreseeable future.

So the lesson here, men – admit your mistakes. 90% of the big life-altering fuck-ups stem from men trying to cover up some bit of wrongdoing. ENRON. Watergate. The Catholic church’s pederast reputation. And now Jeffrey Stenroos can join that category of winners. I see it all the time in the agency world. People fucking up then trying to cover; sometimes they pass the buck, other times they play dumb, act as if an email never got to them, they never saw this movie deal, they read that script but just forgot to bring it up. But the thing is, the other person always knows. In America we’ve grown up exposed to so much bullshit we know when somebody’s just covering his own ass. So please, for the sake of your reputation and our sanity, just be a man, admit your failure, take the blame, punishment, embarrassment, whatever and leave it at that. Because with CSI shit, the Interweb, and a world full of Wikipedia-smartened cynics, it’s getting harder and harder to keep that skeleton in the closet.

- Ryan