No kidding !
Maybe Osama looks like one of our former presidents?
That was in 2007, and there’s only one (rather dubious) original source for the story. worldnetdaily seems to support “birthers” and “death panels”.
Not that it’s impossible mind you. I was there when someone was trying to pay with a very old red seal $100 bill, and had to say something when the clerk was calling the police for it being counterfeit.
Umm, dude? SD has the 2nd highest pop in the state, followed by SJ. (LA does things differently, they use a drunk tank and write tickets instead). So, you’d expect for SJ and SD to have the highest numbers, and they have about the same demographics and population. SD uses a drunk tank.
Oddly, the CA cities with the next highest pops have the next highest numbers. Oakland used to have higher than SJ until just a couple years ago.
It’s really in how you count the arrests and incidents. LA has few 'arrests" as it cites and drunk tanks them, so they don’t count those as “arrests”. :dubious:
Back when I lived a few years on the island of Oahu in the '90’s, my roommate and I were in Waikiki on a Saturday night on our way to a bar. A Honolulu police officer had a car pulled over and was speaking with the car’s driver when we walked across the street. Half way across, my roommate yells, “book 'em, Dano!”
The officer immediately waved the car off, walked across the street and wrote my roommate a ticket for jaywalking.
So that sort of thing can go on, and nobody is arrested and/or loses his job? I walk into Best Buy, pay cash, and get arrested on no charges, and nothing happens?
I’m in the UK and I’ve been threatened with arrest for using bad language in front of – not *at *-- a cop when I was standing on my own doorstep. It was just after I separated from my ex and this was the fourth set of cops in as many months who’d come looking for him, for not providing his driving documents. They knocked on the door and woke me up and the (male) cop took exception when I said something along the lines of fuckin’ hell, not again. He had an exaggerated idea of his own consequence I think. His female companion seemed a bit more sympathetic to my feelings and questioned the neccessity irrc… Anyhow just to follow up this was the point at which I passed on the exe’s address to the police and phoned him to tell him I was done with dealing with his police.
File a complaint. If the PD isn’t lazy or corrupt, Internal Affairs will haul the cop in for a chat. I can’t say whether anything would come of said chat, but most PDs do at least look into complaints and keep a record of them in case a pattern starts to emerge.
You could also sue Best Buy. They might settle just to avoid the embarrassment of a trial.
I think they can get you on interference, if they are in the midst of investigating a crime. Really, there are so many laws in the books, there could be any number of loopholes to bust on the namecaller, if the cops are in a bad enough mood. I’m from Philly, so with all the shootings in recent years I’m sure my local cops aren’t phased by petty things like insults. Still, you get one cop in a foul mood… he’ll/she’ll find something to pin on ya.
SJ’s numbers are about double SD’s. And the ratio to population and arrest as compaired to the rest of the state is about 3 to 4 times. Most other cities do D&D diferently. There have been people thrown into the drunk tank just for questioning the police. They abuse it as a tool for anyone who questions them.
I learned that the Internal Affairs Department in SJ is not the Rat squad but rather the White Wash department.
That’s not really true for minor offenses, for which the cop’s testimony is considered proof enough (there’s even some legal term for it which I forget) by many “judges”. Or at least so I was told when found guilty of an MTA offense for which I was innocent. I was also told I had no right to demand the introduction of evidence which would have been in the possession of the cops (video footage) which would have cleared me.
You were misinformed. In any case for which jail time or a fine may be imposed, the prosecution bears the burden of proof. In practical terms, of course, some judges, magistrates and hearing officers are easily persuaded by the testimony of a single police officer even if disputed.
First: a cop’s testimony, standing alone, is legally sufficient to convict you of murder. That is, the jury, or the judge sitting as finder of fact at a bench trial, may rely solely on the testimony of a single person, and if that person’s testimony establishes the elements of the crime, that’s all that’s needed. The prosecution still has the burden of proof, of course, beyond a reasonable doubt. But it’s the role of the fact finder to hear the evidence and resolve inconsistencies in it.
Of course, as a practical matter, the more serious the crime, the more proof juries typically want to hear.
Second: it’s unclear where the evidence was, how you would have introduced it, or what probative value it had, so I can’t comment on the specifics of your case. But as a general principle, you are certainly entitled to subpoena evidence and the custodians of that evidence for your case.
What if you were playing the song “Fuck Tha Police” by NWA really loud? Singing along with it? Or just singing it?