by Ken Vincent, Featured Contributor
I WAS CHATTING with a police officer the other day about this buzz regarding police harassment. Here is what I got:
Oh yes, we love to harass people, but it is really a tough job. You see there is usually only one officer on duty at any given time for some 5,000 residents. (Of course that varies a lot from location to location.) In many places if you toss in tourist and business locations the ratio is closer to 1/8,000. So we only have about 15 minutes to find a person to harass and get the job done.
But, we do get a lot of help from the people that pay us to harass folks. We get calls like, “My neighbor is beating up on his wife”, and “Someone is trying to break into my house”, and “There is a bunch of young thugs on the corner yelling obscenities at people” and “My daughter just got raped by the school bus driver.” Those kinds of calls give us the chance to lay on some serious harassment.
We also have this book of rules. It includes ordinances and laws that tell us when we should harass people and for what. Just the other day I noticed a guy trying to steal a car. Now the book of rules says that we can harass the heck out of that guy. The book also has a bunch of no-nos about running red lights, stop signs, and speeding. People doing that are set up for special harassment. That can intensify when we find they don’t have a driver’s licence, no insurance, are in a stolen car, or are even in the country illegally. Occasionally we get really lucky and find drugs or illegal weapons in the car and boy can we lay on the harassment then.
After a few months or years of practice one gets pretty good at harassing people. We get up every day saying, “Boy, I wonder how many people I can harass today, or maybe I’ll get lucky and can find some minority kid to shoot.” It just becomes second nature to harass people and play the race card or the power card, or both of them together.
Of course it still hasn’t dawned on some folks that if you want to get shot, just point a gun at a cop or attack him/her. That will get you to the hospital or morgue on a fast track.
