To My Apparent Superiors and Caretakers at the Washington State Patrol‏

And especially to the officer that pulled me over yesterday for talking on my cell phone while driving:

I have seen officers in your employ driving down the road at 20 miles per hour over the speed limit, while typing on the keypads of the laptop computers that are mounted in your cars, while keying the hand-held (NOT hands free!) radio in your car and writing down an address on a piece of paper at the same time, and yet you are going to try and tell me that I am a danger to myself and all those around me because I am having a conversation while driving (something I can do all the time, and legally, by the way, with people who are in the truck with me – I fail to see the difference).

I don’t care if you think that your training makes you capable of doing these things while my apparent lack of training does not. I’ve seen the basic training of patrol officers. In fact, I’ve participated in it through the “explorer” program back in the days when I thought being a gun-toting government enforcer might be a good career path. None of your training prepares you for distracted driving any more than my apparent lack of training does me. I’ve been talking on the phone while driving for almost 15 years, and you are welcome to look up my driving record to see how many accidents I’ve been in and how many infractions I’ve been issued. To save you the time, I will fill you in:

I’ve been in one traffic accident in 15 years, in which I was rear-ended by a driver who could not stop in time. I was aware that this was about to happen, had searched out all escape routes, found none, and managed to pull ahead as far as possible to dampen the collision before it came and yet still avoid hitting the car in front of me.

I’ve had one speeding ticket in 15 years, the circumstances of which I still feel make it fully excusable.

As long as you are willing to consider yourselves my better and not subject to the same laws that I am, I am not willing to follow whichever ukases you choose to not follow yourselves. I have no plans to endanger my family or those around me, and assure you that having a conversation while driving in no way does either.

Until one of your myrmidons catches me driving recklessly as a result of distraction from having a phone conversation while driving, and until you, too, choose to live up to the standards that you are empowered by the people to enforce, I hereby respectfully suggest that you get fucked.

That is all.

Posse Mommitatus‏

An interesting question posed in this Snopes article: “Do you really have to give up your car if a police officer demands it’s use?”

http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/posse.asp

An interesting “what would you do?” question. I always love to take scenarios posed in movies and apply them to real life with the question “what would a normal, rational person do?” It is rarely what the person in the movies does, I assure you. Rational, normal, reasonable decisions do not a good movie make. So, what would you do? A police officer demands that you surrender your vehicle, and states that he is in hot pursuit of a suspect. What do you do?

Me? I don’t really care much what the law says. I’d tell him to go talk a long walk off a short pier – the state does not have the right to confiscate property from private citizens without due process, and this is not due process. If the officer was in dire need of assistance (ie, he was in real trouble and needed help) then I would gladly destroy my truck, and even risk my life to help him out, as I would for any person who needed my help, police officer or not. But I would as soon loan him my truck to chase down a suspect as I would loan my truck to anyone else (just to clue you in, it ain’t gonna happen). This is double true considering the fact that the chances are really good that he is trying to track down a guy for doing something tht I do not consider to be a crime.

Our Boys in Blue

I am not the type of person to glorify police officers, or the work that they do. I’m tired of hearing how they put their lives on the line every day for us, to keep us safe. I don’t believe that to be the case. I work in construction, which is a far more hazardous occupation than law enforcement. Do people glorify construction workers, saying that they “put their lives on the line every day” to provide us with shelter? The way I see it, we all work hard in order to keep police officers in a job, often times in careers far more hazardous than law enforcement could ever be, and they work for us. Far too often, this lionization of any person in uniform leads them to believe that they are a cut above the rest, and that they are our superiors. I’ve known a lot of good cops in my time, but I’ve known a lot of bad ones, too. However, the biggest problem with law enforcement today is that they’ve forgotten their mission. It is not “enforcement of the law at all costs” like they seem to believe. It is to serve and protect the citizenry of their jurisdiction, even the criminals. I’m not even talking about policemen anymore, I’m talking about the overall codes and policies driving them. Things like:

1.) Increased paramilitary-style raids on homes when no threat is apparent, using explosives and automatic weapons;
2.) Increased use of “CI’s” that are unreliable and often times have a vested self-interest in providing information, even if it is false, then using this information as valid probable cause (which it is not) for no-knock paramilitary raids on homes that are often times randomly selected by these CIs;
3.) The policy of shooting any dog that presents itself as aggressive during no-knock raids. My dogs would definitely be aggressive if someone kicked in my front door, how about yours?
4.) The fact that these no-knock raids result in the deaths of many innocent people (and beloved canine companions) each year, all in the spirit of protecting the police officers from harm and in disallowing the destruction of evidence via shock and awe.
5.) The fact that police officer’s lives are seen as more valuable than the lives of any civilian, when the opposite should be true, if the vow to “serve and protect” means anything. Proof of this is the use of these “no-knock” raids, and the fact that if a person shoots or assaults a cop, they get more time in prison than if they shoot or assault a civilian.
6.) The fact that the Supreme Court has ruled that the police have no duty whatsoever to protect you from crime; rather, their only function is to punish those guilty of the crime.
7.) The fact that if a black-clad ninja with automatic weapons ever enters my house and yells “POLICE” I’m supposed to believe him unquestioningly and not attempt to defend my family from the possibility that criminals know how to shout “POLICE” too. They are known to lie, after all. If, on the other hand, the police were to, I don’t know, knock first like human beings, identify themselves and provide identification and then enter… …well, I think I’d be convinced by then.

If a police officer truly believes in the calling of his job, then his life would not be more important than the lives of those he has vowed to serve and protect. Men would not be getting shot 15 times because they had a hose nozzle in their hand and the cops figured “better safe than sorry.” Little girls wouldn’t be getting killed because of high-risk paramilitary raids on the wrong house. I could go on for days if I started listing all of the beloved family pets killed during raids on the wrong address. Don’t accuse me of arm-chair quarterbacking. If you aren’t willing to risk your life to make sure that the innocent civilian has a sprinkler in his hand instead of a gun, then you shouldn’t be a cop. If you aren’t willing to enter a house without kicking in the door, using bombs, shock tactics, and automatic weapons, then you shouldn’t be a cop. I’m willing to let the odd drug dealer get away with it because he had time to flush his stash by the time the knock-and-identify raid got to the point of forced entry – I would much rather live with that than the death of even one more 7 year old girl.

How about you?