Glenn: You are absolutely correct that there are good officers and there are bad officers. It has been my opinion for many decades that the war on drugs has resulted in corruption of our police departments. In addition to the corruption we usually think of, taking bribes or stealing from burglarized homes and businesses, taking a bribe not to write a traffic citation, the more serious corruption is from good cops who have been corrupted into believing that planting evidence or lying about probable cause is okay if it involves putting bad guys in prison where they belong.
Let me give you a recent example involving a retired officer whom I had known for some time and whom I considered an upright guy. I feel I could give him a thousand dollars cash to hold for me and come back in ten years and he would still have the original bills.
Somehow we got to talking about probable cause for making a drug arrest and how often cops lied under oath in order to establish p.c. He was adamant that the police had to have some probable cause to search when they suspected drugs. He was equally adamant about lying under oath, although he couldn't bring himself to say so, his end of the conversation clearly indicated that he thought it was perfectly all right to commit perjury, which, by the way, is a felony in every state that I know of, in order to establish probably cause for searching a vehicle, mostly, but sometimes a house or a person. That's the kind of pervading corruption that bothers me more than the rotten apple taking a bribe which fortunately, is fairly limited.
We see it with the gang list that the LAPD had developed. It listed a lot of people who were not even remotely associated with a gang but they had gotten their name on the gang list by some either corrupted or over-zealous — which is equally as bad — cop. Sham! Sham! Shame!
It is my opinion that we, as citizens of this nation, need to do some serious thinking about what we are doing with invading people's personal privacy in forbidding substances to them and making it serious crime for using and dealing in them. We need to look at other countries and see how they are handling the problem. Surely, if drugs are as destructive as present government policy indicates, we should be able to convince our citizens of that harmfulness.
Just so we are clear, unlike certain recent POTUSes, I have never used illegal drugs in my life. I don't really like to take prescribed painkillers as they make me too wonky. Unlike a recent POTUS, I did not deal drugs in high school or in institutions of higher education. I was in the service at a time when alcohol was all the drug that any of us indulged in and right after my military service with a wife and kids, there wasn't enough money to mess around with drugs and after I completed my education, my hard-earned license was subject to disappearing with a felony conviction, so drugs were never a part of my milieu. My observations are based on viewing drug enforcement from up close in the courtrooms of the military and in California.
Do away with the police? Do you want to see anarchy? Send out social workers to handle the violent mentally ill? Use unarmed workers to hand out traffic tickets? Unfortunately, there are a great many people who do not see the world the way it actually is. They see it in some kind of dream state. They have never experienced the violence that actually exists in the world.
Ask the doctor who had his wife and two teenage daughters raped and killed one by being burned to death how he feels about capital punishment and long term incarceration. He never dreamed in his idyllic suburban setting that such depravity and violence existed until it reached out and ruined his life.
Glenn: You are absolutely correct that there are good officers and there are bad officers. It has been my opinion for many decades that the war on drugs has resulted in corruption of our police departments. In addition to the corruption we usually think of, taking bribes or stealing from burglarized homes and businesses, taking a bribe not to write a traffic citation, the more serious corruption is from good cops who have been corrupted into believing that planting evidence or lying about probable cause is okay if it involves putting bad guys in prison where they belong.
Let me give you a recent example involving a retired officer whom I had known for some time and whom I considered an upright guy. I feel I could give him a thousand dollars cash to hold for me and come back in ten years and he would still have the original bills.
Somehow we got to talking about probable cause for making a drug arrest and how often cops lied under oath in order to establish p.c. He was adamant that the police had to have some probable cause to search when they suspected drugs. He was equally adamant about lying under oath, although he couldn't bring himself to say so, his end of the conversation clearly indicated that he thought it was perfectly all right to commit perjury, which, by the way, is a felony in every state that I know of, in order to establish probably cause for searching a vehicle, mostly, but sometimes a house or a person. That's the kind of pervading corruption that bothers me more than the rotten apple taking a bribe which fortunately, is fairly limited.
We see it with the gang list that the LAPD had developed. It listed a lot of people who were not even remotely associated with a gang but they had gotten their name on the gang list by some either corrupted or over-zealous — which is equally as bad — cop. Sham! Sham! Shame!
It is my opinion that we, as citizens of this nation, need to do some serious thinking about what we are doing with invading people's personal privacy in forbidding substances to them and making it serious crime for using and dealing in them. We need to look at other countries and see how they are handling the problem. Surely, if drugs are as destructive as present government policy indicates, we should be able to convince our citizens of that harmfulness.
Just so we are clear, unlike certain recent POTUSes, I have never used illegal drugs in my life. I don't really like to take prescribed painkillers as they make me too wonky. Unlike a recent POTUS, I did not deal drugs in high school or in institutions of higher education. I was in the service at a time when alcohol was all the drug that any of us indulged in and right after my military service with a wife and kids, there wasn't enough money to mess around with drugs and after I completed my education, my hard-earned license was subject to disappearing with a felony conviction, so drugs were never a part of my milieu. My observations are based on viewing drug enforcement from up close in the courtrooms of the military and in California.
Do away with the police? Do you want to see anarchy? Send out social workers to handle the violent mentally ill? Use unarmed workers to hand out traffic tickets? Unfortunately, there are a great many people who do not see the world the way it actually is. They see it in some kind of dream state. They have never experienced the violence that actually exists in the world.
Ask the doctor who had his wife and two teenage daughters raped and killed one by being burned to death how he feels about capital punishment and long term incarceration. He never dreamed in his idyllic suburban setting that such depravity and violence existed until it reached out and ruined his life.