There's a Illinois State Trooper that lives in my neighborhood. He drives his work vehicle home and ALWAYS parks it illegally. There's a sign saying "no parking" with an arrow pointing right at where he put his car.
Of course he's never ticketed. But this grates me every time I walk by. He is entrusted with enforcing our laws, but can't be arsed to follow them every single night when he parks.
It is a huge erosion of trust in their institution.
At most, he'd be asked to move it. But until then he gets privileges us lower citizens don't have.
Most of these ideas would be stupid, ineffective, or perhaps illegal, but my point is that you might indeed be able to creatively find a way to make sure that the trooper's illegal actions (off duty!)
- Gather evidence. Take pictures every day that he does it.
- Ask him nicely to park legally. Point out that his flagrant disregard for the law erodes everyone's respect for his profession.
- Ask your local police to ticket him personally. They might not do it, but it can't hurt to ask.
- Write to his boss. Write to the governor, call everyone up his chain of command. Point out the respect erosion issue, and ask that police be held to the same laws that they enforce.
- Sue him on behalf of citizens of the city when you see him doing it. I'm sure judges would feel really happy about police officers who flaunt the law for personal benefit.
- Campaign for a local (city/county) law that allows citizens to enforce parking laws (citations, towing, car boot) on any government-owned vehicle that is parked illegally. Make this your public example. (Of course, good luck actually doing that, but the media publicity might shame him?)
- If the place he parks is a "no parking" area due to things like fire hydrants, consider talking to the local fire department.
- Try to alert an impersonal bureaucracy that will treat his illegal parking as something tow-able or otherwise something they can escalate as part of their job.
- Call or write his boss every time you see him do it. Report it by vehicle number.
- Buy two extremely beat up cars and park them on both sides of his vehicle. (That might not be legal, now that I think about it.)
- Propose a local ordinance to give you permission to install a concrete or otherwise similarly heavy / ugly public art work directly next to his car in such a way that it shames him, or makes it really inconvenient to park there.
0: http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=&Sessio...
Take photographs of the car, the sign, and submit the paperwork at the local municipal court. Give the summons to another adult to serve upon the state at police headquarters. You might need to do some research the first time around, but after that, you can ticket that car again every time you walk past it instead of silently fuming at the double standard.
Cops have to obey the law, too. If they won't obey it and enforce it against each other, that leaves it to the rest of us.
In Portland, a total of four PPB officers murdered two mentally ill men in cold blood. They were not prosecuted; the grand jury and PPB internal affairs cleared them.
The family of one of the victims sued and won $2M. I don't clearly recall whether it was a jury verdict or a settlement.
In the other case I don't think there was a lawsuit however the federal government found that the PPB wasn't properly trained to deal with the mentally ill. My own more-recent experience that the PPB is quite good, for example I'd see someone going totally bananas at the Portland Rescue Mission and the cops would show right up, then be completely reasonable, pleasant and polite.
On the other hand, the Santa Cruz Police Department is quite oppressive to the homeless and mentally ill. That led to the Occupy Santa Cruz movement raising quite a lot of Hell, but with the eventual result that things got quite a lot better for the homeless and quite a lot worse for the cops.
edit: s/better/worse/
But they are quick to criticize bad cops in other jurisdictions. Thus when I told a Reno deputy about the OHSU campus cops who beat me up, he got furiously angry, wanted to help me bring them to justice, but I - politely - refused his offer. He has a lot of work to do, I want to take care of that myself
I strongly support organized labor however I do not support what Police Unions commonly do.
For example a month or two ago, some New York City cop shot and killed a man for no apparent reason. Concerned that he might lose his job, he rang up his Union Steward on his phone.
It was four solid minutes before he looked into whether he might render first aid for the guy he had just shot.
It is very commonly the case that when a law enforcement officer commits a really odious crime, his union will come to his aid.
You'd think that wouldn't happen but it does.
So yes I expect that were internal affairs investigations handled as you suggest, it would have a profoundly positive effect. But it would be hard to implement it, as the unions for the bad cops would not agree to it.
Perhaps a way to handle it would be a state ballot proposition. It might be more appealing to the unions were "police force B" chosen totally at random whenever such an investigation was called for.
Around here, to get hired as a police officer or a deputy, one has to pass quite a rigorous background check.
I once had a girlfriend who described herself as "a former law enforcement officer". She never called herself a "police officer" or a "sheriff's deputy", however she was quite expert at handling firearms.
I eventually concluded that she had been a Cadet for the Sheriff, that is, a trainee. The Cadets assist with various law enforcement work but they never actually carry out the actual enforcement.
I figure that someone clued in to that she was mentally ill.
I fear my hallucations; she shoots at them!
Welcome to XXI century, it's becoming harder and harder to tell hallucinations from reality apart. Hell, nowadays you can't call paranoid someone thinking government is watching everything, because he's actually right.
Consider that at one time it was quite common for the mentally ill to consider themselves to be the emperor of france, or at least some manner of royalty.
Now I myself - not at the moment, but not long ago at all - was completely convinced that I was a clandestine operative for the United States Marine Corps Joint Forces Cyber Command.
How I arrived at that conclusion is a little hard to explain, however I have lots of completely rational explanations, for example I really did apply to the USAF Cyber Command when it was announced at Slashdot back in 2008.
There are other little dots here and there. When you see a bunch of dots on a printed page, do you see a picture?
Among the natures of psychosis, is that I see connections that most people don't. You'd connect the dots and you'd see a smiley face or a bumblebee.
I'd connect the dots and I'd see myself as James Bond.
You try not to, but ultimately it's impossible to enter in to an interaction with another person with a completely blank slate. Our previous interactions with people affect how we perceive the world around us. If a subset of people are found to be murderers then the risk of meeting someone in that set who isn't a murderer decreases - to use an ad absurdum example, if there are 1,000,000 police officers and 999,999 of them are murderers, you wouldn't meet the last one thinking "I really ought to give him the benefit of the doubt."
At the moment, the number of police officers who have killed innocent people is still absolutely tiny, so the risk of being killed by one is also tiny, and to that end we should still see police officers as useful, helpful members of society who aren't going to murder us. But also, rationally speaking, the police should welcome every technology that makes people trust them, and that includes cameras that record them rather than us.
Some of my very best friends are convicted murderers.
I regard them as nice people and good friends. On the other hand, those folks are never ever going to get out of the state forensic hospital.
There is no way to verify your claim. In my own antidotal world, I have seen cops ruin people's lives by harassment, and revenue collection!
There are two statements made by Eric Holder's Justice Department that didn't get the traction I felt they needed:
“Local authorities consistently approached law enforcement not as a means for protecting public safety, but as a way of generating revenue,” Holder said
Officers in Ferguson “routinely violate the Fourth Amendment,” Holder said, and stop citizens without reasonable suspicion and then use unreasonable force against them. Incidents often “blatantly cross the line,” he said.
This investigation was specific to Ferguson, Missouri, but I have a feeling they are systemic problems in many towns and cities across America.
I have no way if proving my own personal suspicions about the average Cop, in the average police department, but I don't trust them anymore. I know I have been pulled over for no reason. I have been ticketed for incidents I honestly didn't think I committed. I'm a white dude living in a wealthy community; I often wonder how minorites are treated in other parts of the country?
(I have no answers to the injustices I see, other than arming your vechicle, and person with a video cam. The problem I see now is most cops will be on the lookout for any recording devise.)
In the TV show, the drug cop fires his gun at least once each episode. That would lead the show's fans to expect that most law enforcement officers use their service pistols at least once per week, if not every single day.
In reality, most cops fire their guns at most once during their entire lives. That is, fire them at a suspect and not at a practice target.
I expect they draw their guns a fair amount, but those who understand gun safety know very well that one never points a gun at another human being unless one fully intends to kill them.
Once, one of my father's enlisted men damn near shot his own foot off when he was verifying that his pistol really was unloaded. He followed the US Navy's documented procedure for unloading his gun, the very last step being to pull the trigger.
Oopsy-doodle!
This was one of the biggest criticisms I heard[1][2] (and raised) regarding the protests in Ferguson. The police officers had their weapons constantly trained on the protesters, including sniper rifles and other unnecessarily large weapons. It really sent a bad message, that they were seemingly ready to kill anyone who stepped one foot over the line they laid down. Whether or not this was actually true, it certainly seemed that way.
[1] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/08/14/ferguson-and-... [2] https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/499691017533403137
Nope, Rule 2 is "Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy." (Emphasis added.) Big difference between "fully intends" and willing.
Roughly when did the Navy incident happen? As of late, like the last couple or so decades, I've read that the firearm training has really been shortchanged. It was very different when my father started at Great Lakes before being tapped for OCS.
I can't go into a whole lot of detail as it is late, I am tired and I have lots of work to do.
But more or less I point out to every cop I come across, that while I do know that there are some bad cops, there are bad people everywhere. It is wrong to hate the police despite that there have been lots of officers who have murdered innocent, defenseless people.
I don't judge individuals by the behaviors of other people. Recall what MLK said about "the content of our character". For me, I don't judge someone by the color of their clothes or whether they have a shiny badge affixed to them.
I then point out that I have quite a profoundly serious illness: Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder, and that it is much like being Manic-Depressive and Schizophrenic at the same time.
Being crazy gives me lots of real-world experience with law enforcement. Consider that I was once hospitalized involuntarily for ten solid days because I told some shrink that I planned to "go camping in the desert". See, I was completely unaware that in Reno, when one intends to "go camping in the desert", one intends to commit suicide.
It didn't help to point out that I had the Boy Scout Wilderness Survival Merit Badge, nor that I had camped in the desert just the night before.
I was once beaten unconscious by two cops by having my skull slammed repeatedly into concrete. When I regained consciousness three days later, while I could correctly visualize the spelling of my own name when I thought about it, I was incapable of spelling it when I attempted to write it on paper with a pencil.
You'd think that would make me hate all police officers but no, I don't even hate the two cops who assaulted me with a deadly weapon.
However, I do feel that they should be spending some time behind bars.
On the other hand there have been plenty of times that police officers have saved my very life. The ONLY time I ever saw a cop so much as set foot on the Caltech campus was when a Pasadena Police Department officer came to save me from the Caltech campus security guards who beat the living crap out of me then hurled me bodily down a flight of stairs.
Finally I write down the URL for "Living with Schizoaffective Disorder" then point out that "I wrote it in part to help people like you help people like me".
http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/
Finally, I offer to shake their hand. Cops aren't used to members of the public offering to shake their hand. Quite commonly they are visibly moved by my simple gesture.