Police abuses

[Zim]

I've read the thread from the very first post. I especially enjoyed the bit about fascism pills.

I find the thread on the whole to be a rather interesting mix of some apparently real and shocking abuses of power by law enforcement as well as stories that seem either weak on fact checking or deliberately misrepresenting events.

I posted mainly to mention that a recent link might (I reserve judgment at the moment) be the latter rather than the former. The links I posted were done more on a whim. The former because I thought it was funny (while also being an abuse of the public trust by officers), and the latter because I never saw it on the front page of my news link while the former was, and that made me sad.

The links are more closely related to the topic of the thread than one would think from their first glance, however. In the first we have officers in a marked car stopping at a restaurant that appears to be similar to Hooters (something that could result in discipline in and of itself due to the marked car), drinking "three to five beers" each, and then handing a waitress a duty weapon that may have been loaded (unless they bothered to empty the magazine beforehand) to pose for a picture.

At the very least it's a worse abuse than the supposed one in the link posted earlier where a cop was beat in the head with a flashlight and tased the person in response. At the most it's indicative of the attitude some officers get that they can do anything they want and don't have standards to live up to due to their oath, the same attitude that can lead to further and more severe abuses.

The second link provides a contrast to the almost constantly negative posts in the thread. Reading a thread devoted to one side of a certain subject (in this case, polic abuses) it can be easy to only see that side. It doesn't hurt to remember that these are people who put their lives in danger to keep people safe, and from time to time they pay the ultimate price as a result of fulfilling their duties.

It also helps to show part of the reason cops can seem to be so paranoid or overreact in the name of safety, a subject that has been brought up in the thread before. The job is dangerous. Sometimes we have some idea ahead of time like this particular story. Sometimes it turns out to be the guy an officer pulls over for not having tail lights who gets out of the car and starts shooting (or does so halfway through what seemed a routine encounter).

Iv gotta say, those 2 links were nowhere near the "spirit of the thread". Iv doubt you read anything but maybe the last page.

The first link; a hot chick on a car posing with a officer's m4 (I think its a m4, not sure). Big deal, victimless crime and noone really cares.

2nd one, murder of 2 cops by a guy. Sure, its bad. But nowhere near what this topic has been about.