According to Sam and Jim Commenting on things that irk us off, make us laugh out loud or just seem too weird too believe According to Sam and Jim: Useless Boobs Are Boaring

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Useless Boobs Are Boaring

My stepfather used to say that certain things were as useless as boobs on a boar (except, he didn’t say boobs). Sam and I feel the same way about some cops. There are way too many of them and they are way too aggressive.

Case in point, the U.S. Department of Justice recently handed down a finding that Seattle PD’s enforcement culture was one of routine and widespread use of excessive force and violation of civil rights. Several beatings caught on film and the fatal shooting of woodcarver John T. Williams in August 2010 by Officer Ian Birk led to the Department of Justice finding.

In defense of the cops, a lot of them in our state have been shot lately and that does tend to make you jumpy.  In December of 2009, four uniformed Lakewood officers - three men and one woman - sitting in a coffee shop attempting to catch up on some paperwork were gunned down by a convicted murderer and accused child rapist. And the shooting of cops is not endemic only to Washington State. It also seems to be widespread across the U.S. According to CNN, as of December 28 of this past year, 173 cops were killed in the line of duty - 68 of them by gunfire - an increase of 13% over last year.

That statistic doesn’t even include Ranger Margaret Anderson shot to death on New Year’s Day as she attempted to set up a checkpoint in Mount Rainier National Park to make sure vehicles entering the park carried snow chains.

You can hardly blame the law enforcement community for believing as Fox News reported that, "There's a perception among officers in the field that there’s a war on cops going on."

"It's not a fluke," Richard Roberts, a spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations,, told MSNBC.com. foxnews.com

But it’s not really a war against cops that’s occurring (we thought there was a war going on in the 60’s and 70’s when I was a cop too). No, it’s really just a war against the heavy-handed use of authority. Sam and I are not psychiatrists, but we firmly believe that the big problem here is that a lot of deep-seated emotions of helpless vulnerability and disenfranchisement have been suppressed too long in certain people, resulting in those people exploding and killing authority figures.

It’s unfortunate that the police usually are society’s first line of defense (or offense) against those people who feel disenfranchised and who question and defy authority - riots, “Occupy” movements, etc. result and some poor cop winds up in someone’s gun sight.

Ironically, the more disenfranchised people express their unhappiness and hostility, the more we pass harsher laws, hand down more punitive sentences and build more unforgiving prisons. By unconscious inference we thus expect our police to act harsher and more punitively.

I’m sure all the cops out there are going to scoff at this, but I sincerely wish that it were possible for our uniformed personnel be more like Andy of Mayberry or British Bobbies. I can’t help thinking we would be a whole lot better off if we reverted to your basic flat foot walking a beat every day, actually getting to know the people on his or her beat and treating them as neighbors and friends.

I know, I know, that probably wouldn’t work on our nation’s freeways - kinda’ hard to patrol them on foot. Trouble is we’re too afraid to try something different in this country because we want to believe justice is best served by our Wild West perception that an eagle eye, a steady hand, a lightning-fast draw ala Marshall Dillon and the NRA protecting our right to possess handguns until death do us part will keep us safe.

Boaring! Three bags of poop on useless boobies.

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