Batman is a fictional character but sometimes he seems like our only solution to these kinds of problems. Just do the right thing regardless of the consequences.
This has nothing to do with government bureaucracy, and everything to do with malicious, criminal cops. Don't confuse one for the other.
They suffer no consequences for harassing and abusing people. Frequently they even get away with murder. The cities and their unions protect them, because they know that at the core the police are a criminal enforcer organization. The law protects the rights of the poor and innocent in the USA, but the police are tasked by landowners with a lot more than simply enforcing the law: they want them to enforce the social order, too, which is a much more, err, "informal" process, such as we see here.
This results in a culture of lawlessness in the police, as they carry out the wishes of those who write the checks and suffer no consequences for breaking the law which they exist ostensibly (but not in practice) to uphold.
I've written about this before: https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-ame...
This has everything to do with government (or otherwise, bigCo is not immune to this) bureaucracy.
Diffusion of responsibility, conflicting process, etc. etc. are how this kind of behavior can persist. These cops can do this crap and remain employed because the pile of bureaucratic process that distills everything down to (mostly) objectively evaluate metrics and therefore "doing your job while being a dick" doesn't negatively affect them.
It isn't just police that have this problem. Every regulatory enforcement agency has this problem to various extents.
I don't tend to stay angry for very long. Actually, I pretty much never do. But it's hard to describe the amount of anger one can feel when being the victim of such a blatant bad faith injustice. I never thought I was capable of this, but turns out I am. These people tried to charge me for fixing cracks in the walls because the building had subsided. Yes, really. They literally admitted in the email that they knew this was illegal but were going to try it anyway (and there's a lot more bad faith bullshit in similar fashion). Eventually I got the £2,800 charge down to £800-something after filling a dispute. There was still a bunch of outright bullshit in there (about £200 at the most was justified), but is those £600 worth it?
If you can afford it: probably not. Aside from the time you need to spend on it you just get consumed by anger and negativity. It's not healthy for me, so I just moved on and tried to forget about it. I still get angry when thinking about it though; what bunch of morally bankrupt tosspots.
I've seen this with other people as well; years ago one of my coworkers had a similar conflict with his garage. I don't even know if he was right, but he certainly had the same feeling as I had. He did go to court for it (I don't recall the outcome) and he spent months talking about it to anyone who wanted to listen, including customers (many customers). I don't think it was good for him.
Ideally, government should be better than some random company. But in reality, government and companies are both organisations comprised of the same sort of people, and people can be rather ugly and unreasonable.
I do think you can minimize these sort of things by fostering a good organisational culture, which is easier said than done of course. You will always have some problems, but a lot of the truly outrageously bad problems seem to stem from a toxic culture: the culture at my rental agency, or the culture at the police in the US, or stuff like the toxic culture at the Dutch tax service leading to the recent/on-going scandal regarding false allegations of fraud and ignoring of evidence there was actually no fraud.[2]
[1]: They also evicted me over this, turns out that calling your landlord a cunt over entering your house without ringing the doorbell is not a good idea in a country with minimal protections for renters, even though it was quite justified considering it's 100% unacceptable and illegal and I had already told them many times I didn't want it.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...
After an arrest, police will often ignore exonerating evidence or not bother trying to get it, for much the same reasons. And they have a whole arsenal of tactics for making life a pain in the ass for the accused while they fight to get rid of bogus charges.
And after all that, they make filing a complaint as difficult as possible, after which the complaint either disappears entirely or seemingly sits in a drawer for months to years before ending in a generic finding of no wrongdoing from the officer.
As far as the police are concerned, the system is working as intended. Politicians may disagree, but they're too scared to make serious changes, so it never changes.
And the K9 dog wasn't even the biggest problem in the police handling. The police just acted in bad faith throughout.
I expected to find just one or two extra screw-ups, but good grief, this is just an orgy of fuck-ups. Granted, this is just one side of the story, and some details can perhaps be contested, but overall it seems fairly solid and reliable to me. Much of this was captured on body cams.
A summary:
- A concerned citizen called the police to make sure everything was okay.
- "Inexplicably, instead of initiating contact with Wendy to see if she was okay, Clark instead called for an ambulance–unnecessarily escalating the welfare check without even checking to see what was going on."
- For some reason this "are you okay?" call expanded to a DUI investigation. Wendy was repeatedly denied to do a chemical test for alcohol or drugs, which she asked for to prove her innocence. Clark insisted on doing a field sobriety test, which was "improperly conducted [..] and improperly instructed Wendy on how to perform the tests", and even more damning "Clark positioned Farris to take the field sobriety tests in a spot ↪where the tests themselves would not be caught on camera"
- She failed this test and was placed under arrest. Again she asks for a breath or blood test (the EMTs were still present, had already checked her out, and decided she was fine). Again denied. At this point she was "in a state of near panic".
- Clark's report didn't mention that Wendy had been awake for 24 hours, had just been awoken, was forced to look out into the bright sunlight to respond to the officer (of course her pupils were constricted), and that she wasn't actually driving the car.
- The dog fails to find anything on the first pass of the car, and near the end of the second pass the dog handler touches the car with the hand that was holding the dog's scent toy. Karma looks at his handler and "finds drugs".
- They discover the $5,000. The car was impounded and "ripped apart in an effort to find drugs" which "permanently damaged Wendy’s vehicle". No drugs were found. She never got paid damaged for this.
- Booked in to jail, according to Clark she refused a breathalyser; "Wendy did not decline, she simply advised the deputy that she had been told not to answer questions until her attorney arrived" (who was on their way, and had wisely advised not to answer questions).
- Finally got her blood test done (results for this take a while, more on this later).
- Cited with a DUI violation. Was booked in on Friday and released on Monday (doesn't mention times).
- On Monday the prosecutor dropped the charges as there's no real probably cause.
- The same day Wendy returned to complain about Clark's handling, and "In retaliation, Clark submitted the DUI arrest to the State of Washington Department of Licensing for an administrative decision on Wendy’s license. Wendy had no idea Clark had done this". The paperwork Clark submitted for this claimed that Wendy refused to do a breathalyzer.
- Wendy’s driving privileges were suspended for a year and was required to get SR-22 insurance, which she can't afford. "As a result, Wendy has not driven since she discovered her license was suspended" and "as a result of unjustifiable suspension of her license, Wendy lost job opportunities".
- Wendy was charged again for DUI based on Clark's lie that she had refused to take to a breathalyzer. She had to travel from Montana to Washington only to have the case dismissed again.
- To prove her innocence she tried to get the blood test results, but according to the police office the "lab was busy" and the results weren't ready yet. In May 2020 she contacted the lab directly, and they informed her that the tests had been completed and submitted to the police office on March 27th, 2019.
- She never heard about the complaint she submitted against Clark. Seems to have been >/dev/null'd.
[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.waed.91...