The Glade 4.0

No ... just no.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I didn't know you were either a female or one of my best friends. I understand why you approve of authority for authority's sake - which is why I didn't ask you.

Its clear from their posting that both LK and Foamy defer to the opinion of anyone presented as an authority over any other opinion initially. This is illogical and I want to explore it.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Cops shouldn't be trusted blindly, but at the same time they should be given the same level of trust that you afford to other professionals in your everyday life. I mean, do you assume your bank teller is secretly plotting to rob you of all the money you keep at the bank? No? Well plenty of people assume that the police officer in front of them is just ITCHING to find an excuse to arrest (or in some cases, shoot) every single person that they meet.

Here's a scenario. You're outside mowing your front lawn. A person in a suit and tie comes up to you and says, "I'm from the police department investigating a string of burglaries in the area, could I ask you a few questions?" Which of these is your response?

A. Answer his questions.
B. Ask him to produce some ID showing he really is a cop, then answer his questions.
C. Respond with, "I have nothing to say to you, show me a warrant or get the **** off my property."

The amount of people who would go with C is just ridiculous. They will tell you that the burglary claim is just a carefully concocted lie to give him a reason to fish for an excuse to arrest you. They will tell you that even if the burglary story is true, they would rather deal with the burglar 1-on-1 than deal with any police. And finally, they will tell you that you are putting yourself and your loved ones in great jeopardy if you ever respond to a police officer in any other manner than choice C.

I like this one.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

No, that's not clear from either of their posts. That is the result of you filtering their positions through your ideology which allows for people to either A) distrust authority as a matter of course as you do or B) accept it for its own sake when in fact there are a myriad of other positions. However, you are completely unable to accept that those other postions exist for fear of some inconsistency in your thinking being revealed, and so you lump them all into B.

This is your modus operandi for the last 6 years; define everyone else's positon in terms of what is beneficial to your own argument, then ignore everything they say in favor of insisting loudly on what their position must be.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

No I don't assume that of a bank teller - because I get a receipt which verifies their action.

They also cannot kidnap me, threaten me, make claims that I violated the law which they have a lesser requirement to understand than I do which protects them when they violate it.

I'd go with B as it could easily be burglars gathering information.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Doing this with a uniformed cop is completely absurd, unless there is an active crime spree going on in your area involving a fake uniformed cop, and even then how are you going to know a real police I.D.

If the cop is in plainclothes, absolutely you should do this.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

More skeptical than "B", but far less paranoid than "C".

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

When arrested or ticketed you get a copy of the charges and often, other documentation as well depending on the case.



Anyone can kidnap you. If you mean "may not kidnap you", the police cannot do that either. An arrest you disagree with is not a kidnapping.



Anyone can threaten you



Anyone can claim you violated the law, and the polcie do not have a lesser requirement to understand it. Their requirement is greater.

[quoteI'd go with B as it could easily be burglars gathering information.[/quote]

No, it could not "easily"be burglars unless they were not in uniform. It could conceiveably be burglars, but what percentage of burglars utilize such tactics?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

No one has claimed it is. I've stated at least twice already that the issue is not "being disrespectful to a cop." You are just strawmanning.



Not at all. It's rather a given that some people will have problems with authority in any society; it is merely that one is allowed to express them in this one.



No, we do not. There has been no establishment of any abuse other than some people's personal opinions. The Constitution is not there to protect people from "abuse" that exists only in the minds of a certain political bent.



As a matter of fact, it does. If it did not, it would be impossible to arrest anyone.



Irrelevant. It has nothing to do with their time. The time they are working is on the public dime - and no, that does not mean random members of the public get to veto their actions.



In other words, special privileges. Thank you for contradicting yourself.



We only grant them when lives are at stake? I suppose burglary is no longer worthy of any special action to catch the perpetrator, nor theft, nor arson on abandoned buildings, and so forth.



No, as a matter of fact we do not. We teach young people that there is a time and place to question authority figures so that they can do their job without having to stop for every question that comes up from every random idiot out there, who frequently has absolutely no idea how to handle authority over their own children or a motor vehicle, much less anyone else.

It's very comforting to pretend it's all about "blind trust" (by people conveniently not as witty, smart, insightful, and informed as those who get to rage on the internet) when you see authority doing things you personally disapprove of because deep down inside, you want that authority for yourself. You long to go up to that cop and tell him "No, you can't do that because I **** WELL SAY SO!" and conveniently forget that if you could so could anyone else, meaning that there would soon be no police since they all would quit quite promptly if forced to work under such conditions.



Which should clue you in to how much better behaved our law enforcement organizations are than they. Seriously, so what? What's your source for this?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Police are not held to a lesser standard. There's a difference between a violent kidnapping at gunpoint and a false arrest, even for civilians. How many store owners do you hear of getting 20 years to life for "kidnapping" a suspected shoplifter when it was subsequently revealed that the store owner did not have probable cause to detain them?

The description said a guy in a suit and a tie.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

When this is your default assumption of what it is that cops are out to do, then there is nothing I can say that you would not misconstrue and therefore decide that I blindly accept anything a cop would tell me to do.

I have never been in a position where I was potentially breaking a law, or skirting a law that I don't agree with just because I know I have the right so that I can give a cop an attitude when he tries to "kidnap and threaten me." My experiences with the law have been when I knew there was something I did wrong and I wasn't about to try and get out of it because of some misguided belief that I was being unlawfully detained and IDed.

Cops still have a job to do and this hyper-paraniod belief that being detained for a few moments by a police officer is somehow leading to a police-state is utterly ridiculous.

Look around the world at police forces. Though I can't cite it because this is information gained over many years and various sources, there is plenty of evidence of far worse brutality and rights violation by foreign law enforcement than here in the US.

The fact that you think being asked for an ID by a uniformed patrol officer doing his job is a precursor to Gestapo-USA is completely beyond me.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

That's not his 'default assumption of what they are out to do.' He said they can do it. They have means to do all of these things without very much chance of recrimination. They can arrest you and hold you on the flimsiest of excuses -- though such charges will not hold up in court, it doesn't prevent you from being taken against your will and held for a short period of time. They can make threats against you that you have no chance to hold them to account for. They have no need to be careful about lesser offenses - because they have almost no chance of being arrested or charged even for offenses that have nothing to do with their job, since for anything that doesn't bring in an internal investigations unit, few cops will ever charge one of his own. The badge is a "get out of jail free card."

That's just how it is. Does it mean most of them will take advantage of these facts and act this way? No, it doesn't. But the unfair "advantage" gives way to the level of distrust being described, yes.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Ha, ha, ha! I like this statement, Foamy. I wonder the same thing.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

See most everyone will pick B.

Now how about when I pick B and he won't provide the ID, and then detains me for disorderly conduct and impeding an investigation when I tell him to go pound sand? Do I get charged with assaulting a police officer if I fight back against the unknown man?

Read up on Pittsburgh PD and their plainclothes officers. They like to roll up fast and grab folks with just a badge on a string around their necks.

Police should be held to a higher standard of conduct than those they are policing.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

All my interactions with the police have been reasonable. When I have received a ticket, I deserved it. When I was arrested at 21 for a DUI, I most certainly deserved it. At no time have I had to deal with a rude officer.

Sunday night the flashers went on behind me. I wondered what I was doing wrong, I was slightly below the speed limit, thought maybe I had lost a brake light or something. Nope, he just wanted to get by in slightly heavy traffic. First time I've had that happen in many years.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

What I'm getting at, though, is a situation where the cop would normally not bother detaining/ticketing/arresting someone, but because of personal pique in a particular case, he does. Say, for example, a cop sees someone jaywalk and has no intention whatsoever of getting out of his squad car to go ticket this guy, but then he notices it's his sister's scumbag ex-boyfriend. So, now he decides to go ticket the guy (and take his sweet time doing it) as a bit of a "f*ck you" on behalf of his sister, but of course, he's not stupid, so he follows all the correct procedures along the way. In my opinion, that's an abuse of authority. Yes, the guy was clearly in violation of the law, and yes, the cop followed all the proper procedures, but the cop's reason for ticketing this particular guy was personal, not professional.

Ditto for occasions when the cop's reason for detaining/ticketing/arresting someone is because he thinks the person is rude or disrespectful, because his ego gets involved, because he's just in a bad mood, because he finds skaters annoying, or whatever. If his motivation is personal rather than professional, that's an abuse of authority almost by definition - he's using his authority for personal, not official, reasons. The fact that he does so in ways that are procedurally correct doesn't change the underlying nature of the action.

RD, the examples you gave are petty. In your examples, the people are still breaking the law and still subject to consequences.
The idea that ANYONE can do their job, police or not, without their ego or their emotions occasionally getting in the way is preposterous. We are, after all, only human. You are giving off the impression that just because someone is a police officer that they should *ALWAYS* be 100% professional in their motivations. This is extremely unreasonable and distorted thinking. Yes, police should be held to a higher standard, but come on man, be reasonable.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

I'd say that is a very good argument with what problems are inherent in the system, but the only way to completely remove any vendetta, ego, abuse of power for power's sake, etc would be to have robots enforce the law.

Cops are human and I don't see a good way to train someone to completely shut off all emotion when doing their jobs. Especially in the face of a person who would taunt the officer while (s)he is trying to handle another scofflaw.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

That's more what I was trying to say.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

So using ONLY the examples you give above and not extrapolating it beyond that, I kinda see this as being karma and have a hard time getting all worked up about it being wrong or an abuse of power.

Speaking from personal experience, I've actually gotten out of ticket where I was very much in the wrong (86mph in a 55 zone) by being polite and responsive. This is the other side of that coin.

In short, it's personal judgement of the law enforcement to decide what to actually enforce. And provided that the culture of the department and officers is good, then frankly I want them making those judgement calls. In my mind being able to do that appropriately is the definition of being a good cop.

I suggest you look up "qualified immunity" and get back to me. They can literally assault you and kidnap you for doing nothing illegal and the law protects them from prosecution if they don't know the law while for us ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it.

Get back to me when you've done your research.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

This. I've been cold busted a handful of times for speeding or traffic issues and have not been given a ticket. Right before Christmas, LK and I headed to Tupelo for a date/shopping. My tag was expired. I knew it was, had been for a few months. Get to Aberdeen, cop sees it and pulls me over. He comes to the window, very polite and friendly and informs me whats up. I explain the circumstances, he asks me if I've got any warrants or anything and I say no. He runs a check on my vehicle, tells me to get it taken care of very politely and lets me head on my way.

I've had interactions with the law probably less than 50 times in my life for various reasons. From tickets, to roadblocks to statements because I witnessed an accident. Other than one guy who thought I called him a SOB, I've never had the law treat me in an unprofessional manner.

Just like regular people, I usually give everyone the benefit of the doubt unless they(meaning THAT person specifically) have done something to make me doubt them.

I see some of the folks in this thread who just see every cop as the same one they had an issue with at one point in their lives so they think that's how every cop is.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

I've been given 3 tickets in my life. 2 of those I contested and beat in court. In 3/4 interactions a police officer has given me a ticket. In a non-driving incident I was handcuffed for carrying an air rifle by the side of the road, which isn't illegal. He eventually just gave me a ride home.