WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – Media reported on Saturday that former Scottsdale police officer James Peters who had killed six people over the course of his 13 year policing career was not only receiving $4,500 a month in retirement, but also working for a company, Virtra Systems, that sells real-life firearm training simulators.
“Retirement is the police department’s way of rewarding some of the worst actors in law enforcement,” Kamau said. “And they often get away with it.”
Kamau, a decorated former Hawthorne, California, police detective, said that police officers with questionable service records should not be rewarded for their bad behaviour.
“The only way to stop it is set something in place where an officer who leaves a department with a bad record has to pay some penalty for that,” Kamau said.
The company, VirTra Systems, told Sputnik on Monday that Peters’ experience made him a valuable asset in selling the simulators globally and the former officer was not involved in training.
However, US advocacy group Greater Cleveland Cop Block founder Deo Odolecki told Sputnik that as long as US police departments hire trained killers, further deaths caused by police shootings will occur.
“Someone who kills five people and goes back and kills another, I don’t think he will be too friendly,” Odolecki said.
Police brutality and violence gained renewed focus following a number of high-profile police shootings of unarmed African-American men over the past year. The deaths led to mass protests and calls for law enforcement reform.
More than 650 people have been killed by police violence so far this year in the United States, according to tallies run by multile US media sources.
