I never fell for that “counter-culture” trope of referring to all police as “pigs” because I thought it was unfair. An old Dave Berg cartoon in MAD Magazine encapsulated my opinion perfectly:
Protesting hippies: “Off the Pigs!” “Pigs Off Campus!” etc. etc., all screaming at a tubby police officer standing in front of them. Suddenly, a bunch of hard-hat construction workers dive into the group and start kicking the shit out of them.
Hippies: “Help! Police!”
Policeman (smiling): “Ain’t nobody here but us pigs…”
However, it is an undeniable fact that under this lockdown insanity, many police forces have let their enforcement mandate get out of control (arresting lone paddleboarders, snooping into people’s shopping bags for evidence of “non-essential” purchases, and so on). Then we have bullshit like this:
The New Jersey woman who helped organize and film a protest in the state capitol of Trenton against Governor Phil Murphy’s stay-at-home orders was charged by the state police with violating the emergency decrees.
…not to mention this little injustice:
Artur Pawlowski was feeding homeless people in downtown Calgary when over half a dozen police officers surrounded him and issued him a cool $1,200 fine.
Apparently this gathering was in contravention of new coronavirus lockdown laws, but there were more police officers attending this “crime” than there were alleged offenders.
…not to mention this excellent use of state resources:
A skate park in San Clemente, CA, was filled with 37 tons of sand by local authorities to block skaters from using it during the coronavirus outbreak.
I would go on and on, but as Insty would put it, I’d probably need a bigger blog.
What worries me most about all this is not just that the (mostly Democrat) state governors are going apeshit over this golden opportunity to oppress and control the people who voted them into power. That’s what socialists do, all the time.
What depresses me is that so many police forces are jumping right in and enforcing — in many cases over-stringently — the stupid and ineffective regulations. Even stories like this depress me rather than inspire me:
Wisconsin’s Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling indicated in a statement on Friday he will not enforce the state’s stay-at-home order, which Gov. Tony Evers (D) extended through May 26.
…
While Wisconsin law gives both the governor and Wisconsin DHS “the authority to develop emergency measures and enforce rules and order to protect the public during a health crisis,” Schmaling emphasized that state law “does not have the power to supersede or suspend the Constitutional rights of American citizens.”
Good for him, say I; what saddens me is that every sheriff should be saying and doing this kind of thing, but most aren’t.
So to all my law enforcement friends out there: take your foot off the gas pedal, because at some point you’re going to start encountering increasing backlash from the people you’re supposed to be protecting — and nobody wants that to happen.
Nobody, that is, except the socialist politicians who will respond, as statist authoritarians always do, by increasing the level of oppression (e.g. by trying to pass more gun-control laws and imposing curfews) instead of ameliorating it.
Don’t make us start thinking of calling you “pigs”.
I have zero use for any gov’t employee. A more useless lot is impossible to find. The jackboots on the ground are the most dangerous entities you’re likely to ever encounter. They can kill you for no reason at all and will suffer little to nothing for their crimes.
I really thought the riots were going to come from the more diverse and vibrant areas, but now I”m starting to think it’s going to come from the middle class. The diverse, well they are used to sitting around doing nothing and living off the government. The middle class, the business owners, you’re taking everything from them and literally destroying everything they worked for.
Back a man into a corner with nothing to live for, the results will not be pretty.
I’m in my 50’s, and have only had one negative interaction with a Police officer; a narcissistic idiot his own department couldn’t wait to get rid of. That said, if I were in charge of a police force, I would institute training to encourage officers to think “before I do this, is it going to make me look like an absolute @sshole?”. Every month I read stories about police arresting or ticketing people doing ordinary things like feeding the homeless. And I wonder, “What could possibly be going through the head of a policeman doing that?”
I’m used to that kind of ‘thinking’ from rent-a-cops. My experience of rent-a-cops has been nowhere near as good as my experience of genuine cops.
I’m also in my 50’s and I’m trying to remember if I ever had a non-negative interaction with a police officer, and nothing comes to mind. Now admittedly some of that may be my fault, and most encounters occur during high stress situations, but still, it’s hard to remember any time where a cop has actually helped me or did something nice. I guess the one time I was pulled over with a car full of beer, whiskey and weed the 2 deputies let me go with just a warning. After confiscating all the beer, whiskey, and weed. hmmm. It might have helped that I had the son of a prominent member of our small town in the car with me, along with 6 other boys and girls (it was a land barge from the 60’s, you can haul half the high school in it!!).
That said, the standard trope is that most cops and military are mostly conservative and when the revolution starts, they’ll be on our side. I’m beginning to believe that isn’t true and hasn’t been true for a long time. We’ve been delusional about that issue. The sheer number of incidents where cops are enforcing unconstitutional laws with reckless abandon puts that issue to rest real fast. When the revolution does start, we better be serious because we’ll be standing alone.
“What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, polkers, or whatever else was at hand?”
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I guess I’m too boring to get hassled by cops (except for that lone idiot). OK, I worked for a couple of Heads in a comic shop in the ’70’s in Cleveland, but the cops in the area seemingly didn’t give a fat damn. That job was where I learned that I mostly don’t even LIKE pot.
*shrug*
You may be able to lay that change in character to gun control/pc bullcrap. Back in the late 90’s, I had a conversation with a couple cops at a gun school meeting. They were talking about how they had to lie to get hired as an officer, to hide the fact that they were in the gun culture. Turns out that the big city cop shops instituted a policy to avoid hiring gun knowledgeable people to be cops, to be PC per the local/state politicians. This system spread downward to the smaller cities, of course. With gun purchase records, etc, lots of applicants couldn’t find a way around the new policy, so few would actually make it onto a force.
Lots of downstream side effects of this sort of idiocy. Add in the court approved decision to stop hiring above average IQ people to wear a badge (they’ll get bored and leave, was the excuse), and you end up with a near perfect storm of actual “stormtroopers” with badges. Can’t hit what they aim at, and mindlessly follow unconstitutional orders.
You’re surprised?!?!? You haven’t been paying attention. Watch the reality show “Live PD” for a few episodes. The conduct demonstrated by the midwit cops definitely foreshadowed their conduct during the lockdown. Cops don’t care if they look like assholes. That’s why they took the job.
“Artur Pawlowski was feeding homeless people in downtown Calgary when over half a dozen police officers surrounded him and issued him a cool $1,200 fine.”
It is instructive to consider, by way of comparison, the open carry people who are feeding the homeless in Dallas in sight of City Hall, in spite of the law against doing so.
One thing I’ve been considering is if these kinds of emergency orders are needed in the future (and I’m going to guess every election year with an incumbent Republican in office, they will be), I’d like to propose the following compromise:
If emergency orders are necessary for the public health that need to suspend any of the rights spelled out by the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, or any controlling documents at the state level, such orders can be invoked but at the cost of every individual currently holding elected office at that governmental level is no longer eligible to run for public office at any level ever again.
See, we put large animals (e.g. bears, large cats, etc.) down when they attack humans. We say they “get a taste for human blood” and are therefore far more likely to do it again. It seems like if such orders are needed in the future, that gives politicians a taste for tyranny and it makes them far more likely to do it again.
In the future, if any politician declares an emergency situation that requires him to close down sectors of the economy, he must close down a commensurate amount of the government he heads, letting his underlings undergo the same amount of time off without pay, as he’s imposed upon the citizenry.
I was never literally spat on when I returned from Vietnam but figuratively all of us were shat on…and a career in Law Enforcement certainly allowed me an unwanted scholarship in ad-hominem repartee, so personally I have a high degree of respect for all authority figures until proven otherwise, and an correspondingly negative opinion of those that hold themselves above the law.
….but the ones that set themselves up to be the makers of law to benefit personal agendas for personal gain are to me the least sufferable among us, and the most glaring examples of why we need a Constitution and a Bill of Rights.