How do you feel about your local police department?

Too late! They already have you noted as an agitator.

 

My local police seem to be ok, as long as you're on their good side. I'm a middle aged white guy, and they've caught me rolling a stop sign a couple of times and when they saw the local address on my license they let me off with a warning. My dealings with them have been good. I don't doubt that they're rough when the time comes, or when they want to be.

My son though, he's had a very jaundiced attitude about cops since he was a kid, and I'll tell you why. I when he was 7 or 8 took him fishing at a little municipal lake in suburbia, and he was all excited about it. We're throwing lures and soaking worms when a couple of kids roll up on skateboards. They were maybe 13 to 15, smoking cigarettes, cussing every other word, and generally being little butts. I saw them but didn't pay much attention.

I then heard a guy talking to them kinda loudly but was really not focused on it until I heard him say "You know that little kid that was over there fishing? What did you do to him?" "We didn't do nothing." SMACK! The guy slaps the kid upside the head... he was a big guy, and he didn't really hit him all that hard, but he definitely rocked him. "You dogcussed him, bullied him, and dumped his tackle box on the ground. Don't lie."

The kids sputtering and cussing and "You can't hit me!" SMACK! "Sure I can. How does it feel to be bullied, to have someone bigger than you push you around and you can't do anything about it?" SMACK!

By now I'm just watching openmouthed, and this happens way faster than it takes to tell it.

The big guy turns and walks off, with the kids cussing and crying and carrying on. His family packs their stuff and loads up the car. Kid follows him to the street (at a distance) and gets the tag number. My kid and I talk about what we'd just seen and agree that both sides were jackasses.

A little while later, we're headed out when the kid's mother comes boiling up and wants to know did I see anything. I tell her what I saw, including her kid's behavior, which clearly passes over her head in her outrage with the man who hit her precious darling. I understand that, but her kid was a shithead, although I didn't phrase it that way to her. She gets my name as a witness.

The next week I get a phone call and am asked to stop by the police station and give a statement. I go in and get interviewed by a police lieutenant. I tell him my story and then ask why a patrolman didn't just stop by the house and take a statement. A lieutenant seemed unusual. Yeah, the guy doing the slapping around is a cop on my local force. Oh, happy day.

That was pretty much it for me, he got some kind of administrative punishment and there was never any blowback on me for witnessing against a police officer... but my son's attitude about police officers has never been the same since that day. He just does not trust them, period.

 

I put neither protected nor served. As a matter of expedience, I've concluded they're all assholes.

 

They must already know about the photo of the dongs.

 

For the most part, I've had decent experiences, but I know there's bad ones out there.

 

I had to laugh a little at this poll because where I live now (a village 750 miles from the North Pole) I definitely feel protected and served since there's almost no crime, the biggest "assault" threat is from polar bears, and one of the main duties of the police is some serious badass stuff involving rescues in glacier crevasses and at sea.

But before I came here I was a crime reporter in L.A. for a number of years and, after many ridealongs and visits to prisons to write about various things, I was quietly glad to be a white and white-collar guy. I didn't think most officers would deliberately bust minorities just for kicks, but they definitely didn't get any benefit of the doubt in even mildly suspicious circumstances. And I definitely saw some truly awful cases of racial disparity: a good example is car accidents with a fatality where the not-fault-driver turned out to be DUI. A Hispanic man with no priors in one such case was arrested immediately and spent four years in prison. A white guy with no priors in another spent no time in jail in a similiar incident (I don't remember all the specifics of each case, but I wrote an article about it to show the difference in how similar cases were handled).

Of course, I ran into plenty of suspects and inmates (and their families and loved ones) who very sincerely fed me a load of crap. As a result, I basically don't trust anyone's word when stories such as the Ferguson shooting happen. Then again, as a journalist I suppose that's not entirely a bad thing.

 

I'm surprised The Party already hasn't blocked this site. Especially because of the Poin Files.

 

BTW, I also am a regular reader of the forums at sites like officer.com and police1.com, and am amazed they don't get more attention from the media given the rather disturbing posts there. I'd like to think it's like much of the Web where only the worst drecks of their ranks are posting, but since boards like this seem to consist of reasonably rational folks I worry about the implications if the attitude at those police sites is the norm.

 

I live in a semi-rural, semi-suburban neighborhood, served by the county sheriff's department. I know the sheriff fairly well -- good guy, ex-city cop -- and a couple of the deputies. They serve the county well, but it's a pretty big area to cover that's growing pretty rapidly, so I'm not sure they have the manpower to cover it the way they'd like. I'm not sure they could respond in a truly timely manner if there was a serious issue in my neck of the woods.

In fact, there was a home invasion a couple of years ago less than a half-mile from my house in which the homeowner defended himself and sent two of the perps to the hospital with gunshot wounds, and ever since I've strongly considered buying a handgun and becoming proficient with it. Haven't pulled the trigger on it (figuratively speaking), mostly because I can't afford to buy one at present.

 

Albert, do NOT, repeat DO NOT, buy a pistol for home protection. Useless and likely to get you killed.

If you absolutely insist on arming yourself (a dog is way better protection), get a shotgun. You might actually hit what you're aiming at, and you're much less likely to injure an innocent bystander across the street.

Get a dog.