What are the odds that a police officer's daughter was on the list?

existence of drug dealers and gangs supports and promotes the police force and power increase. Getting habit of freely expressing your non conformist opinions is a path to subversion of existing power (dis)balance.

Wow. That is an incredibly insightful, concise (and cynical) comment. Well said.

Really? You think this is part of a careful long-term plan, motivated by a fundamental characteristic of municipal power structure?

I would lean toward 'officer applying vaguely worded rules to make the law behave as he feels it ought to', but yours is certainly easier to get behind. Fuck the man!

It doesn't have to be a careful long-term plan. I suspect a lot of "conspiracies" are actually emergent behavior in the system of laws and incentives.

I think this is an incredibly important point. It's perfectly possible for each actor in the system to behave in the way that he believes is right and proper, yet for the overall effect of the system to be evil.

I'm sure that this is the explanation for much of the bad that we see, and as a result, those -- especially in politics -- who base their actions on demagoguery, attacking the individual parts of the system, are really doing nothing to help.

I'm sure many of them are. But equally many are mere functions of human nature.

The long-term impacts of individual actions on the power of the police-force as a whole are both non-obvious and very slow. In particular, I really doubt that the social pressure to empower the institution, transmitted down the chain of command, has more impact on police officers than the violence and abuse they witness first- or second-hand.

If you draw some line and say "we are only going to work on crimes more serious than this", you are in effect saying that anyone is free to do the crimes that don't make the cut.

That would be a pretty crappy society in which to live. It's much better to devote some effort to the less serious crimes too. The more serious ones should be the priority.

No, it would be a great society in which to live because you'd have a reasonable number of crimes and you'd have a fair chance of knowing if you were committing them. As it stands now there are an indeterminate amount of crimes specified in such a way that if you upset someone representing the state they will find one to apply to you.

Something Ayn Rand predicted.

Reasonable point; but I think one should draw a line between things that obviously are crimes, and offenses that stretch the definition of 'crime' beyond recognition, as in this case.

Speech is not a crime.