‘I Feel Much Safer Now’

Writes Greg:

Here is another news story about our public servants heroically protecting me from some little girls selling girl scout cookies. This one particularly struck me because it occurred right in the small city where I live and work. Notice in the article they don’t mention the officer’s name, there is no mention of any disciplinary action, and it was just a “misunderstanding.” Also note our fearless Mayor buys off the girls with the offer of a pizza party. I am thinking of calling the Mayor’s office to find out if taxpayers are funding this or if he is forcing the officer to pay for it. I am also curious why he harassed the girls selling at a strip mall but not the ones I saw selling in the parking lot of the local fire station? I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact the ones in the fire station lot were likely daughters of the fire fighters. Like most small towns today we probably have two or three times as many police as needed. They spend the vast majority of their time just sitting alongside the streets watching our every move. Looking for speeders, stop sign rollers, and other such dastardly criminals. Oh, and I forgot, cookie sellers. I recently ran across a copy of the financial report for our city and by far the largest spending is on the police. We also have some history of corruption, of course.

A few years ago, our city, like many, was running an “anti drug” operation on the small portion of I-20 that runs through our city limits. The “ICE” units (Interstate Crime Enforcement) had their own special cars, military combat style uniforms, etc. There is no telling how much in total they “forfeited” from people traveling through but it turned out that under the watchful eyes of our cops at least 1 million dollars of the “forfeitures” had simply disappeared. The only positive to come from it all is the city at least did the right thing and rather than going for “reform” they did away with the whole ICE operation and at least so far have not re-created it.

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4:13 pm on February 26, 2011