Sunday, January 8, 2023
And then there was one..........
I work in a small town in South Carolina (third most violent small town in America in 2019)(I think they're underachieving) and recently many of the surrounding agencies brought the pay rate up to average for the state. Some a bit higher. This town didn't budge, even though the council said the town could afford it.(Heck, we've been coming in under budget in a big way for two years now, though some of that money is unaccounted for now) Then they began cancelling training oportunities. In a matter of a month and a half the entire department, including the Chief, quit. I stayed behind to shut the lights off and lock the door behind me.(I'm looking for a place that I no longer have to work road patrol. 22 years is enough) They hired a new Chief with promises to fix things but they lied to him. He has a positive attitude and is a leader but I've already let him know I'm looking for other opportunities and he should too. It would take at least two years to rebuild this department on the pay rate we have, if at all. The council has learned it can save up a bunch of money by just eliminating the police department. Wonder what the consequences to that decision will be?
Monday, June 13, 2022
It's been a long time
Five years or so. I wonder if anybody even reads blogspot blogs. With the exception of influencers who put links in their YouTube, Insta, etc, I doubt folks remember this media exists. Overshadowed in the long run by video blogs such at TikTok, Instagram, etc.
At one point in the early 2000's, blogging was starting to overshadow other print media. Then the other print media all but disappeared. Hell, I even forgot about this blog. I posted a few things on Instagram. Made a few TikTok videos. But these days I mostly just comment on the content others create. I talk to my friends, both online and in real life through such media. Too busy and too far away to just run and visit.
Don't get me wrong, when I sid 'reads' I in no way meant mine. I barely had anybody reading my stuff. I guess that's why I faded away from this site. It felt a bit like talking to myself, and it wasn't a brilliant conversation.
Maybe I'll start journaling here. Pretty safe to say my secrets will stay secret.
Friday, October 27, 2017
Been seeing alot of hate lately and after some 19 years of it, I don't get as worked up about it as I used to. I've spoken with former Black Panthers who think the insanity against the police has gotten out of hand. I guess I'll put down here a few clues, some of which are old and obvious enough to be cliche while others not so widely known.
1) Folks in bad neighborhoods want us (the Police) to make their neighborhoods safer by cleaning out the criminals. They are angry at us for not doing so yesterday. They want us to arrest the bad guys right up to the point when we actually do, then it becomes we are harassing them. How does this climate shift occur ? Those criminals we arrest, those bad guys we put in jail, THEY ARE SOMEBODY. They are somebody's brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, friends. They are uncles, aunts, fathers, mothers. Regardless of what godawful thing they have done, somebody will always be there to condemn us for arresting them. Now with social media widely available, it's quite easy to manipulate the facts and present a sad tale of how the police arrested their [insert relationship] who was doing nothing wrong.
2) Which brings us to point number two. If it comes to the point where somebody is arrested and taken to jail, THERE IS EVIDENCE THEY COMMITTED A CRIME. The judicial and law enforcement branches have dozens of checks and balances built into the system. The primary one for police are the elements of a crime. Think of laws as recipes. You need certain ingredients, or elements, to make what you are baking. Remove one ingredient and you can't bake your muffins. It really is that simple. Now add a tablespoon of Fourth Amendment. If all the elements for the crime are present and not just assumed, the police must also be able to prove the person they arrested is the person that did it. Remove an element, remove proof of guilt, and an arrest can't be made.
I'm not saying false arrests aren't made. I'm not saying mistaken identity doesn't happen. I'm not saying there aren't corrupt cops out there blurring the lines, but there are checks and balances to weed that out to.
3) And on to three. Nobody hates a bad cop more than I do. Nobody. Not even their victims. A person is falsely or mistakenly arrested (and there is a big difference between the two) they have several legal channels to set things right. They have a lawyer to destroy the case against their client. They have a civil process to punish the officer and his/her department monetarily for either corruption or incompetence along with attorneys and higher law enforcement agencies to assist them in doing so. They have Internal Affairs complaints to yank that officer by his shirt collar and take steps to make sure it never happens again. But even after the case is dismissed, even after the government has cut the victim a hefty check, the fallout will always hinder me, the cop trying to get the job done the right way. I'm the one who faces the hate from all the people the victim has told. I'm the one who can't investigate a crime because nobody talks to me. Heck, I've questioned victims of crimes who called 911 then asked why I was harassing them. I offer rides home to people walking in the middle of the night or in inclement weather and had them refuse or ask to be dropped off outside of their neighborhood so "people don't see them getting out of a police car". If I were in any way considered the good guy, the protector, the man in the white hat, this would not happen. But thanks to the bad apples, the whole bushel is viewed as rotten.
On a side note, and because of this, there is no Wall of Silence. Cops do not keep quiet when an officer goes astray. I've burned a few myself. Bad cops keep me from doing my job efficiently. Bad cops put my safety in danger. I won't have it and neither will most other cops.
4) When a bad cop is doing something wrong, a million other cops are out there doing it right. While those retards driving the jail van were allowing Freddie Gray to die, a million other cops in this nation were protecting and serving. Yet I am at fault and deserve scorn because police, not the whole department but six individuals, in another city did something the wrong way. Really ? I don't judge you on the basis of what somebody else has done, afford me the same courtesy.
5) Please, for your own sake, stop lying and stop believing the lies.I don't understand why alot of YouTubers need to make lies when there's more than enough real misconduct out there to document. You want the world to see corruption and misconduct, get it and show it. You don't need to edit videos to make a this cop look guilty, just show an unedited video of what that cop over there did. It's all just a FOIA away. But some folks realize number 4 is true and fear that common sense will break out, so they doctor, they edit, and add a false click-bait title. I'm amazed when I look at an obviously doctored video, or a video with a false title, and see in the comments how many folks take it as true.Wake up folks, THIS WAS THE FALLACY THAT RUINED THE CREDIBILITY OF BLACK LIVES MATTER. I had such hopes that organization would become a bridge between law enforcement and the community. Hopes that maybe the officer involved shooting rate would go down as an understanding and trust developed. Instead they attacked incidents where the officers acted properly when faced with a deadly force incident. At the last time, which was a bit ago (at least a year) I'll admit, there were 127 shooting incidents by officers and 11 of them were questionable in some way. That is 11 too many in my book but split second decisions are sometimes wrong. BLM could have focused on those 11 and still be at the head of the fight for justice. Instead they attacked the 116 saying, in a nut shell, the police were wrong for defending their lives (not to mention they made it a race issue even when the officer was black). Even the black people in this area lost trust in BLM. Other organizations wonder why they have no credibility. I direct them toward the BLM mistake and encourage them not to do the same.
6) Nothing said here will change your mind. I've seen folks condemn a good arrest and praise a bad one. I've responded to calls, and I HAVE to respond, its my job, where the complainant had a black man in their neighborhood that did not live there and expect me to arrest him, then shout insults about how ineffective the police are when I didn't. We are hated by both sides of the coin folks. Nothing I say or do will change that. Excuse me if I ignore your insults and sarcastic remarks. Its not me that has to change, its you.
1) Folks in bad neighborhoods want us (the Police) to make their neighborhoods safer by cleaning out the criminals. They are angry at us for not doing so yesterday. They want us to arrest the bad guys right up to the point when we actually do, then it becomes we are harassing them. How does this climate shift occur ? Those criminals we arrest, those bad guys we put in jail, THEY ARE SOMEBODY. They are somebody's brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, friends. They are uncles, aunts, fathers, mothers. Regardless of what godawful thing they have done, somebody will always be there to condemn us for arresting them. Now with social media widely available, it's quite easy to manipulate the facts and present a sad tale of how the police arrested their [insert relationship] who was doing nothing wrong.
2) Which brings us to point number two. If it comes to the point where somebody is arrested and taken to jail, THERE IS EVIDENCE THEY COMMITTED A CRIME. The judicial and law enforcement branches have dozens of checks and balances built into the system. The primary one for police are the elements of a crime. Think of laws as recipes. You need certain ingredients, or elements, to make what you are baking. Remove one ingredient and you can't bake your muffins. It really is that simple. Now add a tablespoon of Fourth Amendment. If all the elements for the crime are present and not just assumed, the police must also be able to prove the person they arrested is the person that did it. Remove an element, remove proof of guilt, and an arrest can't be made.
I'm not saying false arrests aren't made. I'm not saying mistaken identity doesn't happen. I'm not saying there aren't corrupt cops out there blurring the lines, but there are checks and balances to weed that out to.
3) And on to three. Nobody hates a bad cop more than I do. Nobody. Not even their victims. A person is falsely or mistakenly arrested (and there is a big difference between the two) they have several legal channels to set things right. They have a lawyer to destroy the case against their client. They have a civil process to punish the officer and his/her department monetarily for either corruption or incompetence along with attorneys and higher law enforcement agencies to assist them in doing so. They have Internal Affairs complaints to yank that officer by his shirt collar and take steps to make sure it never happens again. But even after the case is dismissed, even after the government has cut the victim a hefty check, the fallout will always hinder me, the cop trying to get the job done the right way. I'm the one who faces the hate from all the people the victim has told. I'm the one who can't investigate a crime because nobody talks to me. Heck, I've questioned victims of crimes who called 911 then asked why I was harassing them. I offer rides home to people walking in the middle of the night or in inclement weather and had them refuse or ask to be dropped off outside of their neighborhood so "people don't see them getting out of a police car". If I were in any way considered the good guy, the protector, the man in the white hat, this would not happen. But thanks to the bad apples, the whole bushel is viewed as rotten.
On a side note, and because of this, there is no Wall of Silence. Cops do not keep quiet when an officer goes astray. I've burned a few myself. Bad cops keep me from doing my job efficiently. Bad cops put my safety in danger. I won't have it and neither will most other cops.
4) When a bad cop is doing something wrong, a million other cops are out there doing it right. While those retards driving the jail van were allowing Freddie Gray to die, a million other cops in this nation were protecting and serving. Yet I am at fault and deserve scorn because police, not the whole department but six individuals, in another city did something the wrong way. Really ? I don't judge you on the basis of what somebody else has done, afford me the same courtesy.
5) Please, for your own sake, stop lying and stop believing the lies.I don't understand why alot of YouTubers need to make lies when there's more than enough real misconduct out there to document. You want the world to see corruption and misconduct, get it and show it. You don't need to edit videos to make a this cop look guilty, just show an unedited video of what that cop over there did. It's all just a FOIA away. But some folks realize number 4 is true and fear that common sense will break out, so they doctor, they edit, and add a false click-bait title. I'm amazed when I look at an obviously doctored video, or a video with a false title, and see in the comments how many folks take it as true.Wake up folks, THIS WAS THE FALLACY THAT RUINED THE CREDIBILITY OF BLACK LIVES MATTER. I had such hopes that organization would become a bridge between law enforcement and the community. Hopes that maybe the officer involved shooting rate would go down as an understanding and trust developed. Instead they attacked incidents where the officers acted properly when faced with a deadly force incident. At the last time, which was a bit ago (at least a year) I'll admit, there were 127 shooting incidents by officers and 11 of them were questionable in some way. That is 11 too many in my book but split second decisions are sometimes wrong. BLM could have focused on those 11 and still be at the head of the fight for justice. Instead they attacked the 116 saying, in a nut shell, the police were wrong for defending their lives (not to mention they made it a race issue even when the officer was black). Even the black people in this area lost trust in BLM. Other organizations wonder why they have no credibility. I direct them toward the BLM mistake and encourage them not to do the same.
6) Nothing said here will change your mind. I've seen folks condemn a good arrest and praise a bad one. I've responded to calls, and I HAVE to respond, its my job, where the complainant had a black man in their neighborhood that did not live there and expect me to arrest him, then shout insults about how ineffective the police are when I didn't. We are hated by both sides of the coin folks. Nothing I say or do will change that. Excuse me if I ignore your insults and sarcastic remarks. Its not me that has to change, its you.
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
And the next failure will be......
We have two choices this year. One, Donald Trump, will set race relations, gender relations, sexuality relations, all relations back quite a bit. The other, Hillary Clinton, arguably the lesser of the two evils, is more than willing to take your tax money to increase the Welfare State and has no issues with using unsecure means to transmit secure information and lastly doesn't give a rats ass if US citizens are killed overseas. Thinking there may be no lesser of the two evils on this one. One can only hunker down and pray for the Zombie Apocalypse.
There is no third choice. Sanders won't run independently. We're fucked. The best we can do is sift through the flaws to find the few useful bits of each and decide whether we can live with the bad stuff in hopes of getting the good stuff.
So while the rest of the world alternates between laughing at us and WTF?, you have a pretty nasty decision to make. Good luck.
Monday, August 3, 2015
Random cop musings
So what's going on ? Lessee. We have a young man running around robbing people and businesses. 16 years old. We put him in jail, charged as an adult for kidnapping, burglary, and armed robbery. Judge let him out on his own recognizance the next morning. He was seen later that day talking smack to police officers, saying we couldn't hold him. Over the next week he went on to steal two cars and rob a convenience store. Even in this day and age there are still places with "It can't happen here" mind sets.
I'm taking a MOOC, Massive Open Online Course, through www.Coursera.com. I'm studying under a professor at Leiden University, located in The Hague, Netherlands. The one I'm taking is a study of terrorism and counter terrorism and is proving quite informative. The best part is, it's free unless I want a certificate at the end of the course. I'm thinking $50 is worth it to put on my resume that I took a course there. The site has hundreds of courses available from such small time schools as MIT, Oxford, etc.(sarcasm is just another friendly service we offer) You should look into it. The days when you could spend the rest of your life without continuing education are over.
It's summer, so the kids are out breaking into cars. You'd be amazed how many folks leave their car doors unlocked at their homes. Several firearms stolen so far. Seriously. Who leaves a gun in their car unlocked ? Answer: morons. Hope I don't have to recover one of those weapons off the body of some kid who thought he was a gang banger. Be more than happy to return it to the owner with a punch in the face. Mind you, I praise folks who purchase firearms and are responsible with them. On the low side they can at least protect their families til we get there. On the extreme side, the average body count for an active shooter situation stopped by Law Enforcement is 14.3. For those stopped by an armed citizen it's 2.3 Do the math folks. The criminals have taken away your right to NOT own a gun. All I ask is that you train with it and keep it responsibly. For those of you who think that one day the government will pass laws to take it away, be at peace. They'll have to tell folks in my business to do the taking and I'm sure all police agree, it's not going to happen.
One thing a few folks have asked me about is the present state of affairs concerning race in this country as it applies to my profession. I'll tell ya, it doesn't affect me at all really. I point to the Charleston shootings as an example. Perhaps it's just the area of the country here in the south, but there seems to be some logic here that is missing elsewhere. Folks around here, of all races, understand that most of the people being killed by officers would not have had that happen had they stayed inside the laws. And even though the p.o.s. that gunned those poor folks down at the church did it to spark a race war, it didn't happen because his motives were directed toward a society he thought was predominantly racist. The North Charleston officer who murdered (yes, I saw the video, that's what it was) that fleeing suspect was immediately arrested (once the dumbass with the video finally came forward with it). That's how it's supposed to work.Newsflash, it's not the way these morons thought it was. If society were so polarized that some dumbass could shoot some people and start a race war, it would have started long ago, during the Jim Crow lynchings era. But it's not. If society was so misguided that they saw all police as killing that man, rather than an individual officer, that they felt justified in armed insurrection, rioting, looting, etc, it would have happened. But it didn't. Logic prevailed where elsewhere it didn't. Be an interesting psychological study.
I see race. You can't be human and not. And many black people whom I encounter see me as a white cop, not just a cop. And it does give one preconceived notions. But I don't have to act or make decisions based on them. Most other people don't either. These turd didn't recognize that because their wiring was screwed up. People died for it. They'll get theirs. Society around here understands that. Wish other areas did too.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
State of the world
In Syria we've been dropping explosive stuff on places where non-combatants live. Nothing new there. Irritating that the President thinks this is a way to keep his hands clean rather than sending ground troops, but regardless. Fourteen missions in the past two days according to the Pentagon. ISIS is the target but those pesky civilians keep getting mixed up in it too. Reported 6 dead in the attacks. Bullets have your name on them but bombs and missiles are addressed To Current Resident.
On the home front, scam artists targeting older folk are on the rise. Attack is by volume. Call hundreds of folks and you're bound to find quite a few who really believe you when you tell them you have a warrant for them and unless they send you the security code for a cash card you instruct them to buy they'll be arrested. We make reports on the victims. They feel hollow and stupid when we explain to them we don't serve warrants over the phone, they'll never see their money again unless IC3 (the FBI computer crime division) or the feds can track these guys down, and most likely the suspect wasn't even operating inside this state. Like to one day get ahold of one of these weasels. Just sayin'
Getting closer to Christmas, people. Time for the bad guys to fill their Christmas fund. That means the answer is a resounding NO, people. Your work laptop you left on the back seat is NOT safe until the morning. NO, the handgun you keep in the glove box will not be there next time you look for it. NO, your car is not safe even though its in your driveway, with no valuables in sight, in a gated community or relatively safe subdivision. Most suspects we catch are under 20. Many looking for something they can sell. Just sayin'
On the home front, scam artists targeting older folk are on the rise. Attack is by volume. Call hundreds of folks and you're bound to find quite a few who really believe you when you tell them you have a warrant for them and unless they send you the security code for a cash card you instruct them to buy they'll be arrested. We make reports on the victims. They feel hollow and stupid when we explain to them we don't serve warrants over the phone, they'll never see their money again unless IC3 (the FBI computer crime division) or the feds can track these guys down, and most likely the suspect wasn't even operating inside this state. Like to one day get ahold of one of these weasels. Just sayin'
Getting closer to Christmas, people. Time for the bad guys to fill their Christmas fund. That means the answer is a resounding NO, people. Your work laptop you left on the back seat is NOT safe until the morning. NO, the handgun you keep in the glove box will not be there next time you look for it. NO, your car is not safe even though its in your driveway, with no valuables in sight, in a gated community or relatively safe subdivision. Most suspects we catch are under 20. Many looking for something they can sell. Just sayin'
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Living in the world
Was going to mention the progress in Syria. (Not tooting my own horn but three posts down.....) Syria is now admitting to stockpiles of chemical weapons. Rather than the sarcastic comment, I'm pointing toward this as progress. Russia has stepped forward to assist. The sabers are still there, the rattle has just lowered in volume a bit. We may be able to get through this one without getting up to our necks in yet another Middle Eastern war. As much as I see inevitability in US involvement there, would be nice to keep our troops out of it. Would be nice to see diplomacy take care of some of our differences. While I don't look through Rose Colored glasses, its still and always will be a primarily Muslim region, there are still thinking people there, just as there are here. Play it like Japan, and we'll have a war to end all wars. Play it like a mutual problem to be solved together, and we may get through this.
So tomorrow is September 11th. I don't expect to see anything happen. Tactically, there would be a much greater chance of success were they to wait til a day or two later. I'll be working tomorrow night. With two military installations in my jurisdiction and a third within my county, I'll be max attentive. Never let your guard down. But I expect, if anything is scheduled to happen, it will happen Thursday. I'll be working then too. Bring it.
Oh, the young dirt clod in the below post was arrested since that post.
So tomorrow is September 11th. I don't expect to see anything happen. Tactically, there would be a much greater chance of success were they to wait til a day or two later. I'll be working tomorrow night. With two military installations in my jurisdiction and a third within my county, I'll be max attentive. Never let your guard down. But I expect, if anything is scheduled to happen, it will happen Thursday. I'll be working then too. Bring it.
Oh, the young dirt clod in the below post was arrested since that post.
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