law enforcement is a needed and respectful profession please do not misunderstand me but the problem as i see it is that it attracts the wrong kind of personalities who do not understand the definition of what being a police officer means, they work for the taxpayer i thought? i have relatives in certain police forces and they definitely look out for their own, don't be mislead, nanny laws are a different thread, peace:rose:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ0_HYuR_fk&fmt=18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSvD5SM_uI4&fmt=18 have a nice day

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazy-E :rose:

 

No. Police officers do NOT 'work for the taxpayer'. They work to uphold law and order. In Britain, if the police decided not to provide manpower for trivial things like, for instance, football matches, then football matches (no matter if it was a league match or the FA cup final) could not take place. Why? They are there as a deterrent to stop warring factions from actually warring. They put themselves in the middle of football riots so the guy who brings his kids to watch 'the team' play won't get a bottle across the head or a brick thrown at his kids.

They deal with dead bodies, are witness to the after-effects of murder, rape and brutal crime. They are often first on the scene at pile ups on motorways, having to direct traffic and keep it flowing so emergency services vehicles can attend - and what's stopping the flow of traffic? The gawpers who hang out of their windows trying to catch a glimpse of a dead or mutilated body. Police officers see enough death and mutilation in their job.

They provide assistance to social workers who turn up to take a child into care away from parents who brutalise them. They pick up pre-teens off the street who are wandering around in the early hours of the morning, because mum and dad are too pissed or drugged up or just plain don't give a shit where their kid is.

They pull over the drunk driver, who they've just witnessed narrowly missing driving up onto the pavement and running down a young woman pushing a pram. They're often there at lock out time at the clubs and bars, making sure people move on and aren't fighting. And when there is a fight? It's the police officers who break it up.

And they also have to deal with people who continually talk down to them, who give them attitude because of the colour of their uniform. Because of the badge, because they're 'pigs'. Have any of the people in this thread thought of how many times the officer who gave you attitude had dealt with a shitty attitude THAT DAY!! Not that week? Not that month or year or since starting on the job. THAT. DAY.

I dealt with shitty attitudes every single day I was on the force. I dealt with bigotry, racism, sexism, and every other 'ism' you want to throw out there - a lot from other officers, but more from the people we were there to protect.

And don't forget the officers who get killed in the line of duty. Young men and women who get killed because they're doing their job. And don't give me the line we feed ourselves when talking about soldiers getting killed. About how 'they must know what they're getting themselves into' because in Britain, police officers do NOT carry guns. Their weaponry is very limited. Their best weapon is hope - the hope that the suspect won't be armed. That they won't turn around and push a blade through their chest or into their neck. And yet they still attend the domestic scenes, the pub brawls, the football-hooligan-led skirmishes.

And don't forget these people serving are 'men' and 'women' not robots. Of course they're going to become cynical with the amount of shite they have to put up with. Let them do their jobs for fuck's sake. If you get stopped, there's a reason, if there isn't go along with it.

 

what is your point? i could care less about police officers that get a hard on everytime they put that badge on, excuse me? your empathy is lost on me.

 

In brief terms:

FUCK THE POLICE! ! !

 

Gee, KM, tells us how you really feel about them!!!
It's nice to see you...

 

thank you smcaaphd i will have 2 agree with old tool, you ride the fence? don't get that splinter in your ass because if you can't stand up for what you believe in you obviously do not believe in yourself, golden rule to the mule. that is the number 1 problem with this site and more like it. no one will say what they really believe or where they stand on any of the real issues. you can't anger the herd. it's so much easier 2 fit in :rose:

 

I agree with ewe 1000% Smc, they do a thankless job.

Our cops down here do carry pistols though they're not armed to the teeth and although we do have the occasional incidents of cops shooting offenders it's not a regular thing.

It's a job i wouldn't even think about doing because mainly of the trauma they experience.

 

did you read my first line? thank you kiss my ass

 

Ewe didn't read my post did you?

I know there's officers who use the job as a 'get out of jail free card'. And some even join up with that attitude!! But the majority of men and women serving - certainly the ones I served with - joined up because they believed in law and order. And let's face it, with law and order, what are we left with? Anarchy.

Perhaps if I hadn't served as an officer myself I wouldn't feel quite so strongly as I do. I might even feel the same way certain angry fowl do. But I did, and I'm glad I did. I know I helped people who needed it. Maybe some days I did get fed up and expect people to respect the badge when my own attitude gave little in the way of respect of the people I was dealing with, but on the whole I took the attitude directed toward me with a spoonful of sugar. Because if I hadn't then I would have become one of the kind of officers I personally loathe and despise.

*edit* Deidre - it was ME who I said I sit on the fence. I don't come here to discuss my religious beliefs or non-beliefs. I don't see the point in banging my head time and again and arguing with the same people over the same issues countless number of times. I come here to relax, to write, to have a laugh, even to read others' opinions on certain topics.

As you can see from my posts in this thread, on this issue, I'm not riding any fences at all

 

smc:

look, many young people have such bad opinions of the police force because many have been picked up, stopped, searched and more while doing nothing wrong at all. it's happened to me, it's happened to most of my mates.

i'll change my opinion and have the tiniest bit of respect for them the day i see one acting like a human instead of a pig.

and about the robbery/dog abuse: they're here to protect the public in theory. these people did it to my family, they got away with it, they'll do it to more people. the police couldn't have protected us but they could have protected more families from those same people.

 

Not every cop is a bad apple, sure there's some bad buggers, but what i've seen in Oz it's only 2 or 3% that give the other cops a bad name

 

My point is - now crime - especially in the cities - has changed so much, there's no longer a recognised 'crime ring' dealing with theft and stolen goods. How many people buy 'cheap knock off' goods in pubs because, well, they're cheaper? Where do you think these cheap goods came from? They aren't all straight from the manufacturer, but from homes like yours. The nature of crimes too has changed. Gun crime is now escalating in Britain - which means that there are more crimes against people to investigate, taking the manpower away from burglaries.

To drag the manpower away from crimes against people, as explained above, and put them on chasing down the criminals that took your stuff or even recovering any of the items, would have put more people at risk. And for what really? Replaceable items.

The police can't be there at every turn - they can't put bobbies on every street corner - never could, but now? With crime turning toward more serious, violent crime? Not a chance - and rightly so too, because then we'd become a police state - and I would hate to see that happen!!

I can't say why your friends would have been stopped and searched. Maybe your local force is bent on the numbers game - that happens. They try to justify their budget with arrests. I believe you're a student, and students often carry drugs etc - hence the stop and searches. Because to some forces the number of arrests for minor offences will boost the figures up.

But that's more the fault of the number crunchers, the bureaucrats higher up the ladder, and far out of sight of your beat bobby. But someone who gives an officer lip when they're stopped will become known and may get more than their fair share of stops. Like I said - good and bad everywhere in life!!

 

magpie? than you read my first sentence in that post? it's a fucking miracle. take your pc 2 hell as well

 

Yes i did read it....but I agreed with what Smc wrote about what the cops do in her country which is very similar to what they do down here in Oz. I've experienced the cops in Australia, Sweden Denmark and the UK and i've never had a bad experience with any of them.........and the cops where i live are very approachable and put themselves out there to do many things to help society and the local kids........and a few of them even do a lot of good unpaid work in their personal time.

Also to what Smc said, there are a small percentage of cops that ruin it for the others but the vast majority of them are good people in a thankless job.

 

Smcaaphd you make some excellent point, as only someone from the inside could, but I'm still going to contend some of them. I can only speak from what I've seen in the US but over the past 30 years I have seen the entire concept of law enforcement change here far more than the nature of crime has. Simply put the general public has changed from something to protect and serve to the enemy and that is a huge lose for both the public and law enforcement.

I think you also understate at least from my perspective in the US the seriousness of the problem. First, maybe there are only a few bad cops out of the whole profession, but it only takes one of them (Daryl Gates comes to mind) to turn an entire police force into a barrel of rotten apples. I also think you have to admit that, just like the Priest Hood, there is a danger in the wrong type of person being attracted to law enforcement for the worst of reasons. I know for sure that in the US there used to be a concerted effort to screen these people out, but from what I've seen over the past 30 years those types of screenings are not very effective anymore because too many of the wrong personality types are clearly shown on video tapes, complaints and investigations. And while it only takes a very few of these types to create a negative perspective with people in the public I bet you know it also only takes a few of them to begin to change the attitudes and behaviors of good law enforcement officers.

Finally while I admit the existence of huge stress and emotional factors I also believe that those must be acknowledged before someone enters law enforcement and accepted as part of the job once they are in there. To me what this really means is police need more training before they go on the job and more kinds of support once they are on the job. And I don't mean just blind public support because they have a tough job. I mean more counseling support, more professional training support and more administrative support. And yes more support for weeding out people who should not be in the job in the first place.

I also don't usually buy the argument about how many officers die or are injured in the line of duty argument. I can assure you that more people are crippled and killed in my profession every year than policemen. And if both of us really want to work in a dangerous profession where are lives are apparently at risk 24 hours a day we should be farmers because more of them are crippled and killed every year than in almost any other profession.

Sahara you've hit on what I think is the most critical and crucial point of all and that is that law enforcement tends to pass on their bad apples rather than weed them out and make sure they never are allowed to put on a gun and a badge again.

I speak from personal experience here because so many of these officers that should have been fired or even investigated and tried for crimes are allowed to resign instead and end up getting a job in small towns like the one I live in. We had a constant stream of them and are still having problems because of it.

Now, admittedly this is true for some other professions as well; doctors and teachers come to mind. First in the case of police and doctors for example there is a tendency for them to want to stick together and not expose or even criticize one of their own. This to me is a very serious mistake and they should actually be more vigilant than other professions. But in the cases of doctors, teachers and police officers I have also seen countless examples of being caught in behaviors that they should have been fired or even jailed for, and instead out of fear of potential lawsuits they were allowed to resign and given a passing recommendation. I've seen child molesters caught in the act of molesting a child and they just ended up in another classroom 10 miles down the road.

I've seen police officers guilty of everything from check fraud to taking incident liberties with a minor have their investigations dropped and be shuffled off to something like a park ranger where all they have to do is stay long enough for a good recommendation and they end up right back in a patrol car carrying a gun and a badge but they don't change and never will.

That is exactly the case of the officer that personally fucked me up once he got the handcuffs on me and now he's a deputy county sheriff even though his fellow officers KNOW how corrupt and abusive he is. If the town that initially caught him fucking teenage girls had done their part none of the rest of it would ever have happened. Instead I still have to be looking over my shoulder for him every time I go home simply because my wife is prettier than his and because a lot of people like me and hate him. That's a huge disadvantage in a personal grudge match when he not only had a club and a gun but the entire legal system on his side.

And no they don't investigate him. They don't respond to what are now more than 100 complaints filed against him. They FUCKING PROTECT HIM.

 

​

 

I have always liked and respected police officers. Once two of them threw me into an alley, beat me up, and broke several of my ribs. That did not change my attitude. It was a freak incident about which no conclusions should be drawn.

 

you still respect those exact same piggies who beat you up, broke your ribs etc for no reason? you genuinely respect them?

not me. if people wrong me they don't deserve my respect. and in my experiences with the police, as i've said, they're all like that. never met a good one.

 

Obviously I do not respect the officers who beat me up. I respect police officers in general. I have told several about my experience, and they were disturbed by it.

I have also been the victim of several violent crimes. I hate criminals and want them to suffer.