re: #137 Dark_Falcon

To me, only the former makes sense. A perfunctory investigation that ended up accepting Zimmerman’s story would have had the same effect as getting behind Zimmerman and pushing, and it would have carried far lesser risk. The deciding factor in my mind is the active effort to force the facts and witness accounts to fit Zimmerman’s story, something the law does not at all require. The laws do not fine a municipality simply because some of the evidence collected by its police is contradictory. The lengths the SPD went to cannot be explained by simple self-protection of their own. They only make sense if protecting Zimmerman was a primary goal.

I’m not so sure the primary goal was protecting Zimmerman so much as it was protecting the city from the financial consequences of trying him in court. The cops get on the scene and find a dead kid and a guy swearing that he was fighting to protect himself and that he should in “self-defense.” The moment that got up the chain to the chief and the state attorney, it probably started ringing alarm bells. And the word came down to do everything possible to stonewall, hamper, and otherwise destroy the investigation in order to avoid charging Zimmerman.