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.