‘If you lick the urinal you won’t get arrested’: US officer to homeless man
- Hawaii policeman John Rabago laughed as he told his colleagues what he’d made the man do. But one of them reported it, and he now faces 10 years in jail
The homeless man stood in a public bathroom, waiting to be handcuffed.
But John Rabago, a Honolulu police officer, waved a get-out-of-jail-free card. He told Samuel Ingall, 37, that he could avoid arrest – but only if he was willing to humiliate himself and potentially expose himself to all kinds of alarming bacteria in the process.
“If you lick the urinal,” Rabago told him, “you won’t get arrested.”
The January 2018 confrontation sparked a federal investigation that concluded on Monday, when Rabago, 43, pleaded guilty to conspiring to deprive Ingall of his civil rights. Though the officer initially had claimed his comments were a joke that got misconstrued, a former Honolulu police officer, Reginald Ramones, also 43, who pleaded guilty in September and promised to testify against Rabago, said that the threat was entirely serious.
He was forced to essentially do something that’s disgusting … The police officers thought this was amusing … they chose to do this to him because he was vulnerable
And Ingall evidently took it literally: He reluctantly agreed to lick the public toilet so that he could avoid going to jail, prosecutors say.