Heh… “rage.” Anyhoo, “complete sentence” is, as I’m sure you know, a term for a sentence that contains both a subject and a predicate. If it’s missing one of those elements, it’s called an “incomplete sentence.”
I know you were referring to the fact that the quote was technically taken out of context, though honestly you don’t lose much in this instance. You said, “Police aren’t stupid, if you spotted them, it’s because they wanted you to.” It’s not a stretch to cherry-pick the quote “Police aren’t stupid” and call that a bold statement. It’s not as if the statement “police aren’t stupid” was dependent upon certain circumstances in the original quote, as in “police aren’t stupid if they happen to be educated and sensitive to the needs of the population they are sworn to protect and defend.”
So feel free to decry Scooter’s quote as being an incomplete quote. But punctuation aside, it wasn’t an incomplete sentence.
For what it’s worth, that doesn’t in and of itself disqualify your initial point about how the undercover cops are never discovered accidentally or through any lack of disguise competence on their part, but only when they consciously decide to unmask themselves. That argument will have to stagger into the ring and defend itself elsewhere, since I don’t really have the expertise to purse my lips and blow it over myself.
You do make a good point that anyone who dismisses the cops (particularly ones hostile to their cause) as incompetent goons does so at their own peril. Even in today’s environment of municipal budget cuts, police forces are generally far better-funded and better-organized and arguably better-trained than your garden-variety protest groups. But I was interested in your link about bringing counter-insurgency strategy to domestic police work. The story didn’t seem to have anything to do with undercover work. Rather, it seemed like some “revolutionary” re-application of the timeworn Officer Friendly approach, wherein the Fuzz make a strong public presence known, not as a show of force, but engaging with law-abiding residents and businesses in a positive way to show how much the force cares about the community and to eventually convince the common folk to trust the cops and help them out with investigations.
The fact that this approach has been defunct long enough that it now purports to derive from counter-insurgency soldier work in Afghanistan is kinda… depressing. Cops were always supposed to act like they were on the same side as the law-abiding folks in the neighborhood, instead of doing whatever they could to alienate the community at large.
