Orem County must be a great place to live

[apotheosis]

With a police force that injures old women for not watering their lawns, how can this town be anything but a wonderful place to raise a family?

http://www.sltrib.com/ci_6928168?source=rss



Also, the Clay County police really understand how to protect civilians. They tazered a mentally ill person in a wheel chair until she had a heart attack and died.... a total of ten tazer shocks.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/wkmg/20070919/lo_wkmg/14147512




And with the other recent thing, I'm really starting to wonder why we pay taxes....

If we wanted old women beaten up and crippled people tazered to death, we could do it ourselves.

[donteatpoop]

All jokes aside, that bitch should have just watered her fucking lawn. How fucking difficult is it to water your lawn? Injured or not, the grass doesn't diserve to go without water.

[End Master]

Heh, I remember when they had a cop talk to us in elementary school, the cop speaker made a big deal about how they couldn’t just go around shooting people even if the person was a criminal since that would make them just as crazy as they were.

I was a little disappointed when I found that out and decided not to become a police officer when I grew up.

Although it would appear that I could’ve become one, and shot whoever I wanted anyway.

(Sigh) My broken dreams…


So who here has ever had any problem with cops? (Besides Chubby of course) Happily, I’ve never come into any major conflict with any of them. Though there was this fucking “by the numbers” cop that was giving everyone shit on the block about not parking trucks on the street for a few months. He started ticketing everyone and threatening to have vehicles towed away. Fortunately he retired soon and moved away.

[Vesnic]

I had a cop closely follow me all the way home from work once (30 minutes) and then wait at the end of my street, just sitting there at the turn until I was out of site. I still am not sure why this happened, but it might have had something to do with getting in trouble at work for spending most of my time surfing the Travel Advisory Pages. I mean, I know I look like a hardened terrorist and everything, but what's so weird about wanting to know about the current political situation in Cameroon? Zheesh! What a bunch of redneck hicks in my town.

I almost got my ass kicked by a ticket inspector once. He wasn't exactly a cop, but he was still an asshole with a thuggish sense of authority.

[Locke]

Arrested once when I was 15 or so for running from one. I was on a school roof with a few of my friends, and apparently someone called us in - he was a young one, and came storming onto the grounds shouting "GET THE FUCK DOWN OFF THAT ROOF!". If he'd just asked I would've done it, but his rather hyperaggressive nature scared me more than a little, so I ran off. He gave chase, shouting "STAY RIGHT THE FUCK THERE!" to my friends and bellowing "WE'VE GOT A RUNNER; I NEED BACKUP!" into his walkie-talkie.

At the time I did not know running from the police was a crime - and I did stop after twenty feet or so, when I realized my friends were, in fact, staying put and would tell the officer who I was and where I lived anyway so he could come get me. He handcuffed me even though I was then being apparently cooperative and hadn't done anything else wrong, and took me in to the station where I got to listen to a lovely drunken brawl occuring one cell over for an hour or so. I got thirty hours of community service for that one (or one and a half for each foot I ran, or twenty more than my cousin got for throwing his hundred-man drug party). Aside from several tickets and being routinely harrassed whenever I walk somewhere at night with friends that isn't an open place of business, that was the only thing, really. Unless you count the airport security guys, who give me the extra-intense search every time I pass through, but they're just doing their job...

You can count on police to be authoritarian and irritating for the most part if you encounter them, but there are plenty of bigger issues in the country that need dealing with. They only enforce the laws, after all; blame the people who keep making them first. Fix the disease, not the symptoms. Some abuse of power and wrongdoing is bound to occur anywhere. That doesn't make it right, but it is a fact of human nature - and in spite of everything, ours is still a "freer" society than most. Which really goes to say something about a number of other nations, come to think of it...

[apotheosis]

I got yelled at once for "obstructing sidewalk traffic" when I stopped to say hello to a friend who was sitting in a bench. I kept walking then... and nothing ever came of it.

[End Master]

Not exactly the police, but I think I came really close to getting thrown in jail for "contempt of court."

Oh Christ, End's telling anecdotes again...

I was at Jury Duty and unfortunately this time I actually got called upon to the jury box as one of the potential picks. The case was some attempted murder trial and really seemed to be a no brainer. The guy tried to kill a police officer (Guilty already) He looked liked some gangbanger that wasn't even "dressed up" for the occasion, he was dressed like he just came back from a drive-by (really guilty) plus there were a shitload of witnesses and they were ALL other cops, (REALL REALLY guilty!) they even had some Canadian police officers coming in to testify, making this some sort of damn near international incident. (Why are we even bothering with a trial again?)

Anyway the judge started asking all the jurors questions. Like stuff about their name, job, etc. and how they're doing. Often everyone said "Okay" or "Fine"

That's the first question she asked me, and my answer got her all pissed off.

Judge: "How are you doing today?"
Me: "I'm here."

At that point she started going on about how "lovely" that was, and how much better it was to be "here" than Iraq or where Katrinia hit at the time. And how we all had things we didn't want to do, but we did them anyway. Of course I didn't disagree with her, but that still wasn't going to change my lack of enthusiasm of actually being there. After that she ran through a whole list of question like a drill sergeant and I gave really short direct answers. She was obviously angry, but there's not much else she could do, since I hadn't actually done anything to warrant getting punished. I answered all her questions and didn't mouth off after all.

So she ended up taking her displeasure with me on the other jurors after that, since up until that point she had been somewhat friendly. She started asking follow up questions about if they may have any biases and could be completely objective. Most of the answers initially were "Yes, I'll try to be." or "I think can."

She didn't like the non-absolute way people were answering so she started bullying and badgering people with the same question until they actually said "Yes! I'll be completely objective!" or "No! I won't be influenced by things that occurred in my life!"

Anyway, I fortunately got dismissed by the defense team and got to go home. :)

[Vesnic]

You're lucky you got to go home. I got called to jury duty like the second I turned 18 for a dumb DUI case. They didn't really care who sat on the jury, so they pointed to the bench where I was seated and said, "You're all up." The defendant was this inbred redneck with an IQ somewhere around 22. He had been swerving all over the road and was missing like all his mirrors, which was of course the reason why he couldn't see the cop behind him blaring his siren at full blast. The real clincher, though, was when he argued that he couldn't perform that thumb-to-fingers one-two-three-four sobriety test because he got shot in the hand once while hunting. As he was saying this, he was absentmindedly performing that same sobriety test without any apparent difficulties. Our "deliberation" over lunch consisted mostly of us making funny impersonations of the guy and having a good laugh at his expense. The sweaty public defender had obviously suffered a stroke at some point, and as he limped out of the courtroom, he muttered out of one side of his mouth, "Well, at leas' dey got air condishnin up'ere..."