I appreciate your coming here, learning more about the most extreme members of your professional fraternity and talking with all of us.

But, as has often been said, by Radley, by “The Wire” producer and ex-cop Ed Burns, and many others, the problem has little at all to do with any individual police officers. The problem is with the institutions of law enforcement as they exist today. Those institutions are creating and promoting the harm, and little to no good can be achieved while they hold sway.

I live in New York City. By all standards, the NYPD is one of the best police departments in the nation, and is particularly appealing compared to the DC police I grew up with during the first era of Marion Barry. But that still comes with nearly annual wrong-door SWAT raids leading to people getting killed, and an unarmed black man getting mowed down by a hail of gunfire, not to mention warrantless searches and a spy network costing New Yorkers millions to plant cops in peacenik meetings all over the country, not to mention loads of less fatal brutality.

The most remarkable thing about this is not that it happens; some amount of it is inevitable in a city with over 50,000 cops. The most remarkable thing is that nothing ever changes. None of these shootings leads to better firearms training for cops. None of it leads to real oversight of the police department. Every year or so, another citizen shot down in a hail of bullets, and another long list of reasons why this shit just has to happen and there is nothing that can be done about it. The institution is incapable of learning or serving its employers better.

The funny thing is that I know several NYPD officers. Good guys, all of them. But there simply is no way that I can possibly morally cooperate with the institution they represent. On anything. The NYPD village must be destroyed for us to have hope of saving it.

I wish it was just the drug war. But I know better. Anyone who has peeked at the Hoover archives does. Before it was dope, it was commies, or Zoot suiters in LA, or people who were pissed because they couldn’t buy their way out of the draft during the Civil War. It isn’t merely the drug war which has put us all in a tough situation – your statement itself is evidence of that. Police are citizens, and nothing more. You are I aren’t any different, and a free society cannot afford to distinguish between us because of what we do for a living. As long as there is a real distinction between those who are subject to the law and those who enforce it, the system will always be broken. We cannot afford for there to be an “us” and a “them”.

Would that include drug “crimes”?

That’s a nice sentiment, but does it include calling out your co-workers who *do* intimidate or arrest someone for photography or cycling? If does, you’re headed for a short and miserable career. And if it *doesn’t*, you’ll be an accessory to their brutality.

“Revisionist History”?

We KNOW from the record – documents written and published by he protest organizers, memoirs, etc. – that the intention was to provoke the cops. We know, in fact, that several of the protest organizers hoped that the rank and file protesters would get pounded, because they said so. That makes the protesters wrong. Doesn’t make the cops RIGHT, mind you. But that’s what I’m saying; BOTH SIDES WERE IN THE WRONG, and they fed off each-other.

We have a tendency to assume that if one side is wrong, the other is right. More often than not they are both made up of thugs and fools.

If and when you become a cop, please remember that photography is not a crime. Even if the person is photographing you making an arrest.

Riding a bike (motor or not) is also not a crime.

Seconded.

What I don’t get is that Alabama is red on the federal level but both the House and Senate of the State Legislature is over 60% Democrat. In local politics the Dems win all the time.

Edwin, it’s a toss-up — do the righteous republicans and neocons hate gays more than they hate knowing that someone, somewhere, might be playing bingo without permission? The AL Constitution is about 400 pages long with 800 “amendments.” Nineteen amendments mention bingo.

One of the last amendments defines marriage as being between a man and a woman. I shudder to think what would happen if we had a gay bingo hall. Shazam.

We also love to put people in jail for a long time. I think someone started a petition to just mail their guilty verdicts in and skip those pesky trials.

It must be my browser or something.

Surely, the New Professionalism is, in part, the result of learning lessons from past embarrassments like the
Good Ol’ Boy Roundup and the subsequent harsh punishments doled out.

If you have any soul or conscience pick another field.

Understand it’s not a vocal minority that’s bad. It’s not a large majority that’s bad. It’s EVERY SINGLE ONE that’s bad. Because if you refuse to “play ball” you will just end up out on your ass unemployed, publicly disgraced (even if they have to make it up) and damn near unemployable.

For your own sake, and your families if you have one, DONT DO IT.

It’s like joining the gestapo to change it from the inside. It’s a lose-lose situation.

However, am I the only one thought the shirt was funny? I laughed out loud, not only at the shirt, but at the ridiculousness of the entire situation.