Tag: police

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #6,149

yeah I know you did not ask!

You are sitting in your vehicular mode of transportation.  You are at a traffic light.  The traffic light is red.  You are second in line.  The vehicle in front of you is a Dodge Durango. It is a Chesterfield police cruiser.

The light changes from red to green.  The member of Chesterfield’s Police Department driving the SUV must be involved with his cell phone, his on board computer, daydreaming… who knows.  He does not move.

My question is to you is, do you give this Chesterfield’s finest a little toot of your horn to alert him to the change in the status of the traffic light, or do you just sit there, gnashing your teeth, impatiently drumming your fingers on the steering wheel,  ruing the day you were born, waiting for him to come back down to earth?

I once followed a Chesterfield police cruiser going the same direction as me.  We made three left turns with him making a final left as I turned right.  He never once used his turn signal. I guarantee (as my Cajun coworker use to say,,,drawing the word out)  I was diligently using my factory installed method of indicating a change in direction in order to be courteous and safe… and to avoid any possible ticket.

Can you make a citizen’s arrest for traffic violations?

And so it goes.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #7,135

yeah I know you did not ask!

I suppose another one you could file under ironic. Certainly something to ponder on.

I was working with one of my Spanish tutors when somehow the subject of George Floyd and Michael Brown came up.  My Mexican tutor who lives in Tijuana told me that in Mexico the American police have the reputation of being brutal.  I had no real argument with that, but said, “and the police in Mexico?” To which he replied, “they are not brutal, simply corrupt.”

What a world we live in when those who should be serving and protecting are frequently doing neither.

And so it goes.

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Why Police Shoot – Tampa Bay Times article

This is a very sad, and a very disturbing article.  There were two things in the story that really surprised me.  First, is that there are no real stats kept on police shootings!

“The Florida Department of Law Enforcement can say how many purse snatchings there were in any given year, but not how many times officers fired on citizens. The FBI’s statistics on police shootings aren’t much better. No one keeps accurate count.

“Embarrassing and ridiculous,” FBI director James B. Comey called the lack of data.

“Unacceptable,” former Attorney General Eric Holder called it.

For the past three years, shootings of unarmed black men caught on video have sparked outrage. But they are anecdotes. Without data, there’s no scope.

“How can we fix what we can’t measure?” asked Vanita Gupta, who headed the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division…”

The second thing that really surprised is the extent of police forfeiture and Continue reading “Why Police Shoot – Tampa Bay Times article”