it’s the bragging. Take that on board, you bragged there, about being a sociopathic asshole this one time
And now you’re making threats? Clearly you’ve grown as a person since then!
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[quote=“wrecksdart, post:24, topic:96780, full:true”]
Also, your father sounds like an entertaining person. [/quote]
He can be, though sometimes when he says things it’s hard to tell if he believes it, is trolling, or is asking the kind of tediously annoying questions used to sound out if you really know what you are talking about and to make you think your position completely through. That isn’t always consistent.
One thing I did learn from him is that people > politics. Always. Unlike what some of the US reps have been saying lately, it didn’t matter to him if you voted for him or actively campaigned against him – if you lived in his area, you were his constituent and he owed you a certain amount* of consideration. And if you phone up at 3am and said there’s been a landslide into your basement, he’ll be one of the first to show up with a shovel (happens more than you’d think).
*asterisk because some people think that means 100% for them alone. But he’d never sneak out the back door or even run away at the grocery store. Public service means service.
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I think I’ve shared this story before, but I’m too lazy to check, so forgive me in advance for being repetitive. I had an unfortunate encounter with a boyfriend in my twenties that resulted in a warrant for my arrest. After booking, etc., the arresting officer, who told me while getting my mugshot that I was “super cute,” got my number and address and proceeded to visit me. At first: “I’m just checking to make sure you are okay.” Later, after I politely rebuffed his advances: “Hey, baby, I know you want it.” I’ve never, ever, never, ever felt more powerless, and that experience with state-sanctioned authority remains with me still. I was lucky – it eventually resolved itself (i.e., he gave up), but there are so many who don’t get so lucky. Granted, there are lovely cops, there are awful cops. I steer clear nonetheless.
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Okay, bad first: I lived in a craptastic neighborhood in grad school, in Mesa, AZ. But the place was affordable on a grad school budget, had a grocery and a couple convenience stores in walking distance, and I could get to campus quickly without paying Tempe rents. Being a grad student with no melanin in my skin and living in a lake of fire, I was nocturnal most of the time. I also drove a car older than me, and since it was old (but mechanically sound), it became a place for my sticker collection. Which was fairly innocuous (lots of mental health and HIV/AIDS activism stickers) but irritated the hell out of the local fuzz.
Most nights, I took a walk to the grocery or convenience store, for food or caffeine, and I got stop-and-frisked at least one night out of five. And by frisk, I mean sexual assault, because those Mormon cops had no compunction about feeling up a grungy/gothy/clearly not Mormon girl. Digital cameras barely existed, and were far beyond my budget, tape recorders were bulky enough to be obvious and the tape would have been destroyed when found anyway. If I complained to their supervisors, I would have had no evidence, so it would go nowhere, all the judges were bishops or stake presidents, and I had both femaleness and Gentile-ness against me in those courts at that time. I also got pulled over 19 times in those 18 months, always for a lighting violation that wasn’t. Sometimes it was the license plate light – either too bright or too visible or not visible enough (even though that light was in perfect working order, per the design spec, and legal per the judge who eventually wrote me a letter to keep in the car to forestall the inevitable fix it tickets that he had to dismiss) and sometimes they said I had a white light to the rear because the tail light lenses had bleached from bright red to pink-red. Those 18 months made me understand bad policing in ways that most white, middle class geeks can’t. When someone tells me it’s bad, I believe them.
The good one: After grad school, once I had my license, I took the first job offered that was more than 1000 miles away. Ended up in Colorado Springs, during the really dark days of Focus on the Family and Betty Byers and her crusade against anyone not her. And it was still better than Mesa. The towns are about the same size, same socio-econ stats, have equally conservative majorities, I was driving the same beater and still in a bad neighborhood and mostly nocturnal… and I never got pulled over or stop and frisked. I was working with cops (first job was court-ordered mental health) but they didn’t know what I drove. I had street parking, and my car got hit-and-runned one night. The other car did not fare as well as mine, and was found abandoned a couple blocks away, in a puddle of coolant and oil. (Don’t hit 2500 pounds of 1970s Detroit rolling iron. It does not end well.) The CSPD did a great job finding the driver and helping me get the paperwork so my insurance and the car’s owner would pay up. CSPD, for all their city government faults, were fair and helpful, and were really good at helping my clients when they were victims, no matter if my clients were already on probation or parole.
Good leadership matters in police departments – the biggest difference between MPD and CSPD was the chief of police. I don’t think I will ever trust a blue uniform, but the department culture can mean the difference between a department worth trying and one that needs to be considered just another gang.
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I know that one! I got pulled over in Maine once for having a ‘dirty license plate’. When the officer told me that I said “I know, it’s got Massachusetts ALL OVER IT”. He laughed. I was a 22 year old white-guy then. I got to drive away, without a ticket.
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I’ve seen it described like this: 10% of cops are good, 10% of cops are bad, and the other 80% will be good or bad depending on the police culture around them.
Unfortunately, when a department goes toxic, the 10% good ones get driven out fairly quickly.
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That’s just depressing. I feel fortunate that my local municipal forces are run in the way the citizens demand, and operate under community-based protocols. That 10% bad is still present, and once in a great while, we hear of unsavory shenanigans, but the death rate of would-be arrestees is extraordinarily low compared to most other US cities.
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And we can expect to hear far less about unsavory LEO shenanigans in the future, given our new Attorney General. Or, better phrasing, we can expect to see less Federal investigation of unsavory LEO shenanigans during this administration.
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The fine people who maintain <a href=“http://killedbypolice.net/“target=”_blank”>Killed by Police are still collecting all the media reports of the Murderers in Blue. Prosecutions of the killers can still persist at the state level, but Federal civil rights violations won’t get investigated (these were rarely prosecuted prior to 45).
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Not justice, but I can’t bring myself to feel anything but relief that he will never victimize more people who have already been greviously harmed.
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