Roadside hummers and other related thoughts

If the beast roars out, you have to give it sacrifice that will satiate its voracious appetite. And the quicker you can toss it a tender morsel of flesh, the safer the village will be in the end.

This was the message that flashed down the narrow dendrites in Sheriff Jim Bowen’s brain last week, when a husky voice on the other end of the phone started unfolding for him the events that transpired in Edinburg. Deputy Donnie Harder got caught with his pants down, the voice says. The dumb fuck decided to get a piece of action and he did it with the wrong woman, the voice explains. They’re going to rip you to shreds over this; you might as well hang up now and clear your desk.

No way, Bowen’s Id cries out. That’s no way for a man of the law to go down, especially the longest-tenured sheriff in New York State. Find a sacrifice to the beast; give it something juicy from the get-go, so there are no other questions to answer.

Moments later, he’s on the phone with Jim Murphy, the unopposed Saratoga County district attorney and a card-carrying member of the same Republican cabal. He’s bastion of faith in the county, and a guy who hasn’t had a challenger in years. He’s safety.

Murphy understands the situation. Bowen is cashing in a political favor. He needs help on this, and the county’s top prosecutor is just the man to do it. He’s got a spotless record, and he’s often regarded as the man who modernized the prosecutor’s office.

Together, Murphy and Bowen lay the cards on the table: There’s a deputy who thinks it's alright to get a blowjob on the clock, and there’s a good chance his indiscretion isn’t the only one taking place within. There’s a challenger for the sheriff’s seat whose main claim to fame is a campaign to unveil the political favoritism in the village of Corinth. The mere notion of a corrupt sheriff’s department would be enough for him to steal the incompetence vote: The teaming volumes of people who pull the lever for a candidate simply because he or she purportedly represents change.

So they throw Harder to the wolves. Less than four hours after the alleged incident occurred, Murphy lodges a felony charge against the deputy that could land him a 25-year prison term. By noon the next day, Murphy and Bowen have the press conference scheduled. The call to the media is so quick that the normal channels of information dissemination –leaks through political enemies and social anarchists –don’t have time to start spreading the news.

By 2 p.m. on Aug. 12, Bowen drops the bombshell: My deputy coerced a woman into sucking him off, and he did it using his badge as prod. The story is sensational. The press and television reporters eat it up. When Bowen wakes up the next morning, Harder is corralled in Saratoga County Jail on $25,000 cash-bail and he’s not likely to get sprung. After all, Harder barely has time to break the news to his wife before his mug is plastered all over the internet and on the evening broadcast.

Every newscast and every newspaper contains the same story. The homogeneous coverage is to the extent that a reader could rip-off the by-line and not be able to distinguish between the articles. Curiously absent from each one is the notion that Harder’s indiscretion might be emblematic of a deeper, more sinister problem that has metastasized in the sheriff’s department under its geriatric leader.

These are problems that have slowly bubbled to the surface of Bowen’s ever-growing law enforcement complex. For instance, there’s the case of Deputy Bill Marshall, a longtime member of the sheriff’s department and Junior Baseball league manager, who escaped any sort of legal ramifications for falsely charging a teen that got punched by one of his players.

The quirky story was first covered by a Times Union sports writer and gained steam before Bowen and Murphy colluded to bury it. At the time, Bowen said Marshall’s behavior “didn’t look good” and swore he’d get to the bottom of it.

But the bottom turned out to be the charges getting dropped and the case being thrown out of court; the latter of which would have happened anyway. Yet nobody asked why Marshall wasn’t reprimanded at the very least; or even better, charged with making an unlawful arrest. The case virtually vanished until there were some murmurs about it after Harder’s arrest.

These are just the latest in a long string of very public misbehavior by Bowen’s boys or by Harder himself. Let’s not forget these are the same guys who happened to be speeding in driving rain four years ago when they slammed into Phil Eckstein, a popular Skidmore student who died from his injuries. And let’s not forget about the time they rammed a Saratoga Springs crew team in 2000.

Harder also has a penchant for slamming into things, no pun intended. In 2007, he rear-ended a car in Wilton with enough force to smash it into a third car. At the time, Harder was processing a shoplifter he picked up from the mall. The girl suffered a bruised forehead, cut nose and lost a tooth; injuries that suggest she was placed in the back of the cruiser, but not with a seat belt properly fashioned.

Interestingly enough, none of the news agencies made this connection while they lapped up Bowen’s story like warm milk on a cold day. Now more than a week later, they haven’t bothered to ask what Harder’s penance was for injuring a suspect. Why? Because Bowen generally doesn’t talk to the media. When he does, he spits out very carefully orchestrated sound bites that ensure there won’t be any follow up questions.

Not to credit the media for its unbelievable lack of effort. They have become complacent with the way Bowen and Murphy run the show. Today, they don’t bother calling Bowen for information, because they realize there’s only one way they’ll get it: At an abruptly called news conference with Murphy by his side.

Well boys and girls, it’s time to start asking some goddamn questions. Letting Bowen squirm out of the Harder story, the Marshall affair or any of these disasters of injustice is simply appalling. He needs to be taken to task for his mismanagement and inability to keep his cops out of trouble. After all, shit flows down stream. And if a lowlife deputy like Harder is getting blown in his cruiser at the bottom of that stream, there must be some serious issues at the top.