Wow. Really…just wow. “Here, father’s cousin’s sister’s former roommate from college…have a card.”
Legally, sure. But asking somebody to murder Chris Christie is still a moral wrong, even if they’re too stupid to ask someone who actually exists.
Have you *met *Chris Christie ?
edited to remove a posting I have rethought recounting.
I don’t really mind the ticket fixing so much as the drug running, larceny, source-revealing, and interfering with an investigation. I, a nobody, have talked my way out of speeding and parking tickets, but I’ve never run cocaine.
[quote=“Huerta88, post:11, topic:602314”]
This isn’t a cop problem at all really (other than that they express their position in more vulgar blue collar ways).
This is a union problem.
All unions are incipient rackets.
All unions rush to the defense of union or union-friendly miscreants, and have no concern about the horrible public perception this creates. The whole point of militant unionism is to say “F you, general public, we got ours and we’re not letting go of it.” The whole point is to negotiate contracts where behavior like this can’t and won’t be punished (don’t hold your breath waiting for a single one of those cops to be disciplined for openly advocating illegal activity, policy manual be damned).
This is no different, not one bit different, from teachers unionists encouraging their members to pray for Chris Christie to die.
Okay… so I’m a cop in a right to work state… what problems on the other side of the fence do we encounter. Captain’s new girlfriend gets made Sgt… put in charge of a special operation… guys who have 20+yrs and veterans with leadership told they can’t work the day shift… A completely incompetent rookie who is a danger to all of us is passed through FTO training because his GRANNY use to bang our Deputy Chief…
Yeah… Unions are the source of all of the woes…
Hmmm. No, I’d say it’s simply misguided. After all, if the Christian God exists as envisioned, He is the ultimate lawmaker; if He does visit death upon the hapless target of the prayer, then it’s by definition a moral act. And the penitents know this rule, so they’re safe in asking for it: it will occur only if God wishes it to, meaning only if it’s moral.
And if He doesn’t exist, then the request is a nullity from the beginning, void ab initio.
Contrast this with, say, voodoo. If enemies of Chris Christie were stabbing CC dolls with pins in an effort to harm Chris, that would be immoral – they believe their efforts will succeed.
Sooooo you didn’t read the article at all, did you?
1600 counts for 16 officers. Even if every single instance was merely a fixed ticket, that’s way more than “a few tickets.” 100 fixed tickets per officer means they’re not playing the occasional get-out-of-jail-free card, it’s a regular occurrence no matter how long these guys might have been on the force. And it’s not just fixed tickets, if the bolded charges have any merit to them.
If all it was was a few fixed tickets, there wouldn’t be a story, because as you say, it’s not all that surprising. This goes way the hell beyond that.
How funny that I just read this the other day: 5 Terrible Ideas That Solved Huge Global Problems. Number 4 is about the firing of every single traffic cop in the nation of Georgia in 2004. Thirty thousand officers got the boot, all at once, leaving no one to police the streets. And…everything was fine. Turned out the cops were the ones causing most of the problems in the first place.
A union can take any political stance it wants on behalf of its members. But the article says that prosecutors were considering racketeering charges against it, which to my mind involves some ongoing overt acts. What did they think the union was doing, as opposed to saying?
I’m not too hot and bothered over the ticket fixing. Its not cool, but not in the least bit surprising. Just another benefit for a job that does not pay enough to put your life on the line. However, planting drugs on innocent civilians, and helping someone get away with assault and much worse problems and those concern me greatly.
I’m not saying there aren’t a large number, I’m saying that ticket fixing is not a secret. It also shouldn’t be the slightest bit surprising that ticket fix requests would go to select individuals in the union, if they have the connections to make it happen. In the article, the union president said ticket fixing was “accepted at all ranks for decades”. What should be insulting is the faux outrage by people who are “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in this establishment”.
As to the other charges, of course you prosecute them. I’m not sure if those charges alone would generate the kind of publicity the “ticket fixing” scandal has, but that is obviously criminal conduct and needs to be treated as such.
It’s structural.
Their goal is to manipulate wages upward and (in every case I know of) protect people from discipline/demotion/firing based solely upon union membership and/or seniority (not merit).
Now, you can view “capital” as a collective racket trying to manipulate wages downward, but that’s dog bites man, the Marxists made that argument years ago. Understanding that unions are every bit as much a cartel enterprise as the mob with whom they tend to be so closely associated with in the trades (wonder why?) is the man bites dog story.
Or their immediate families.
But it is the degree that matters. Your post tried to minimize it by saying “a few tickets,” and the outrage, at least mine, is primarily along the lines of, “Holy shit, that many?”
I’m okay, kind of, with cops cutting other cops slack on tickets. I’m willing to overlook cops cutting the immediate families of other cops slack. But “others with clout” is bullshit, and if the cops or their families are screwing up so bad that they regularly need to have their tickets disappeared, then they need to change their behavior.
Looking the other way should be done as a favor when the friend or family member accidentally does something once in a blue moon, like going 15 over when they’re late to an appointment or they mistimed a red light. It shouldn’t be carte blanche for them to just ignore the law entirely.
Actually from what I understand real vodou curses are a bit more analogous to your description of the Christian “curse” outlined above–more of a “if the spirit wills it” than “stabbing this doll means I really think you’re going to die.” Anyway voodoo dolls are largely a fictional invention of outsiders.
OK then, what if I wish a Mr. Creosote incident to befall Chris Christie…in other words, that he eats until he bursts–or, less Monty Pythonish, that he be hoist by his own petard?
Honestly, the number doesn’t surprise me much either. There are 34,000 cops in NYC, 1,600 fixes means 1 out of every 20 cops has arranged a fix during the timeframe of the investigation. Considering that the attitude was one of professional courtesy, rather than shady dealings, I don’t think that number is weird. In fact, I would expect the number of fixes to be significantly higher, but these are just the fixes associated with the suspects they arrested.
So why are the 1600 counts only charged to 16 individuals?
Cops get paid plenty and are not at any great risk. Maybe you want to make commercial fisherman above the law, too?
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/pf/jobs/1108/gallery.dangerous_jobs/index.html
This stupid meme of “we do something dangerous therefore we get to fuck everyone else over” is inane enough on its face even before you realize that the average cop will usually refuse to put his own life in danger to help any non-cop, and statistics bear out that it’s a relatively safe profession.
I assumed they were contacts that other officers used to make the fixes happen. I could be wrong, and fully assert my right to flip flop if that is the case.