Omniscient,
Perhaps a sergeant shouldn’t be responding to a call his girlfriend called in…
Knowing what I do about the Chicago PD, in the absence of a hypothetical missing part of that article where the police beat the woman and her kids for 5 minutes, making that arrest wasn’t the worst thing they did that day, or perhaps even that hour. She got off light.
Oh well, can’t please everybody. Most people complain that we don’t do enough.
All I can say is that I am grateful for the efforts that our police officer members have outlined in this thread. Thank you.
Most are too concerned with being the morality police and bring in revenue for the city and state as opposed to actually fighting any crime. Get burglarized and they laugh at you if you ask what the odds are it will be solved. Park 12 inches to close to a hydrant and you’ll be forking over $200 or losing your car.
Please don’t ask for my appreciation.
Seems that the Trib’s awful excuse for a website changed the link above. Here’s a new one.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here. The incident posted above happened in Crestwood, a suburb, and has nothing to do with the Chicago PD. The cops somehow felt that their time was best spent inventing crime. Crestwood has plenty of more important issues.
Even if this had been in Chicago, the fact that the police abuse their authority in much more egregious ways somehow makes this ok? Really, that’s the argument you are trying to make?
Or are you saying that so long as the cops didn’t use force to subdue the woman that it should be taken in stride, for the greater good?
Of course she got off light, she only had to hire a lawyer and go to court and risk losing her children because some bored cop felt he needed to exert his authority. Please, law enforcement, do us a favor take a nap or grab some donuts when you aren’t called or actively investigating an actual crime. Don’t look in my windows and don’t pull over or question “suspicious” individuals. Feel free to continue to park illegally and get your discounted pasta because clearly your judgment of what is an important use of your time isn’t up to par.
Cheesesteak asked why the door of a business would be unlocked in the middle of the day and not mean that we want random people off the street coming in. Apparently you skipped over reading the in the middle of the day part.
Both.
No kidding? So when I said the fact that the door is unlocked in the middle of the day indicated to you that nobody’s there?
And my assertion is that there is no reason for a cop to be trying to get into my business or my residence unless one of two conditions is met: I have issued an invitation or a judge has signed a warrant. Otherwise, the cop should be walking on by without even a thought of trying to open the door. The fact that he would find it locked because the doors automatically lock at a predetermined time is immaterial. There is no reason a cop should be trying to get in, at all, without an invitation from a company rep or a search warrant. I don’t want them checking to make sure things are OK.
Yep.
Thank you for that. Since I see you arbitrarily assign motivation to most people in a occupation countrywide I realize I can completely dismiss your opinion as total blather. Saves me some time.
Perhaps I’ve not been reading your previous posts properly, so forgive me if that’s the case. What is your rationale for being bothered by a law enforcement officer checking on the security of neighborhood businesses (and I’m talking about at night, after business hours, in this case)? Is it a privacy issue for you, or are you concerned about dishonest officers potentially having access to your business, or something else altogether?
It’s a serious question – I’m having difficulty imagining why this would be a problem for any business owner, so I’d appreciate your perspective.
My apologies for getting authority having jurisdiction wrong; I’m not familiar with Chicago geography.
I’m not arguing that the lady in question deserved the absurd treatment she got, nor arguing that the law enforcement officers were not in the wrong. Frankly, I wish those cops could get nailed with kidnapping charges for what they did, as well as a civil judgment for damages.
Still, I am aware for a fact that minorities in Chicago proper suffer worse abuse by the Chicago PD than this woman did, and strongly suspect worse abuses occur on a daily basis. The outcome for this woman could have easily been much, much worse than it was.
That story makes me very sad. Why does the fat bald guy get the hot MILF?
This whole unlocked business debate came from what pkbites said in the first response to the OP, right? How can anybody possibly disagree with the part about checking for unlocked doors? As the owner of a retail business, I certainly do appreciate the police making random checks at night to see if the doors are locked.
Of course, if the door is unlocked, I’d rather get a phone call than have the officer clear the building. I might actually be there working late, and a ringing phone is much less unsettling than the sudden and unexpected appearance of someone with a firearm when you think you’re alone.
As a side note, I was chatting with one of our local cops, and he told me that he could check many of the doors in town (including mine) without leaving his car. I raised my eyebrows and he shined a flashlight at my door. The deadbolt reflected back through the gap between the door and the frame. After ten years in this town, he knows which doors that trick works on, and when one isn’t locked, he can just make a quick call on his cellphone (or have the dispatcher do it).
YOU said “I don’t consider an unlocked door at any time of day or night an invitation to the police to come poking around looking through my property.” Those are YOUR words, and YOU were not talking about “in the middle of the day”. So it a little odd for you to accuse me of “skipping over” what Cheesesteak said, when you YOURSELF made the point I was responding to. It might be understandable for me to “skip over” what he said (if I had done so); it’s a little harder to understand how you could skip over something you said yourself.
But most people who are less belligerent than you actually WANT the police to follow up on situations where a mistake has apparently been made. They don’t want their premises vandalized or their inventory stolen. Since the vast majority of people lock up unattended business premises and inventory, especially at night, an unlocked unoccupied business is almost certainly a mistake. So while it may be your own personal preference that the police disregard such a situation, they aren’t going to stop such a service – and it is a service, not a requirement – to satisfy you at the expense of everyone else. IOW, you may not want them checking to make sure everything is OK, but almost everyone else does. IMO, their position is defensible. Yours is irrational, because by God you’d rather lose your business and inventory rather than have a passing cop jiggle the doorknob and then give you a call.
That’s exactly what happens (the phone call, that is). Officers do not enter unless it appears to be a crime in progress (burglary, robbery, arson, etc.). Other than that theres no room clearing unless the keyholder request it when he/she comes down to lock up.
This idea that cops are just walking into the business they find unlocked is coming from bigotries certain members of this board have about police officers.
Well, I do put a very high value on privacy. I don’t like uninvited visitors. I also have encountered enough dishonest cops to never take ‘just checking up’ at face value.
I don’t have a view of cops as … someone friendly who’s there to help me. I leave them alone, and want them to leave me alone.
What I said in resonse to Cheesesteak was:
That was in response to the middle of the day question. Why you went off on some kind of ridiculous tangent assuming this means that I leave the door to the office wide open 24/7 is beyond me, but that’s your assumption. All I said was, door unlocked or door locked, it’s not an invitation to the cops to please come in.
If it is just a service, then why the federal case about me opting out?
You’d think that I was trying to beat up boxes of kittens or barbecue babies, but all I’m saying is that I don’t want someone checking up on me. Did I say they shouldn’t check your doors if you want them to? Nope. If you want to sign up, be my guest. I’d just prefer they only perform this service for people who request it.
The “federal case” is not you choosing to opt out, but rather you acting like the police’s general practice is unreasonable. It isn’t. In fact, it is your position that is extraordinarily unusual and IMO unreasonable, because you appear to value your privacy above your investment in your business and possibly even above your own safety. The vast majority of people do not hold that POV; they don’t think that the police checking the security of business doors after hours is a serious infringement on their privacy.
That’s obvious. But ISTM this will always be self-fulfillng prophecy with you. Here, you are insisting that they affirmative do NOT help you, even if the extent of the help is to check your business’s front door and then call you on the phone. They are NOT friendly people who are there to help you, because you will not allow them to be. Any attempt by them to do ANYTHING that approaches that is, to you, an invasion of your privacy. Again, I don’t really care if that’s your POV, depressing as it would seem to be to me, but it is worth pointing out it is not a widely held view.
They don’t have to wait for people to affirmatively request it, because most people appreciate it and even expect it. That’s my point. Your position to the contrary is very unusual and IMO irrational. I don’t care if you hold it, but I do care, in the most minor way, when you post as if the practice is not defensible when it is.
You can’t see how a cop doing “random checks” is a unsettling concept? Seriously?
I realize that the posters in this thread are interested in the greater good and that they intend to help their taxpayers and local businesses by rattling door knobs, but that and any other inventive ways they might spend their time can be extremely unwelcome.
Let’s assume Officer Friendly rattles a lock and finds it unlocked, something he’s never encountered before at this location, he needs to make a judgment on what the most likely scenario is. Police don’t always have the same priorities and judgment that the property owner might have and he might leap to the conclusion that an unlocked door where there’s never been one before is most likely a crime scene. His job might have conditioned him to assume the worst. He might be eager for advancement and the possibility of a bust like this is tempting. The privacy of that property owner is very low on his list of priorities. That makes my skin crawl.
It also opens up a giant slippery slope. So you’re ok with the cop doing random checks of local businesses. Are you ok with a cop driving down your street and looking into your front window doing random checks of activity? Are you ok with cops making random traffic stops? I know that being a single, white male in the driving alone at night in the suburbs has led bored cops doing random stops to administer a dozen sobriety tests that were unneeded and unwarranted.
It’s these levels of acceptance from people like you that opens the door for all the more serious abuses of power. Too many of these police abuse cases start out with a cop doing random checks and finding someone who doesn’t welcome it for one reason or another.
If a cop doesn’t have legitimate probable cause he should never say a word to me or ask me a question, let alone rattle my locks or stop and detain me.
I think you are dead wrong in the opinion that it’s rare for people to not want this type of “help”. Pop into a minority neighborhood and see what the consensus is on this topic.
This is my problem: 99 out of a 100 cops are terrific people who hold their authority in the proper perspective and use sound judgment. However there’s always that 1 who isn’t.
Accepting, and to a degree expecting, the police to be this proactive means you accept and expect it from every cop, including that untrustworthy abusive 1%. I refuse to allow that. If doing “random checks” is the standard operating procedure then we citizens have no recourse when that bad cop sticks his head where it doesn’t belong.
Um, OK, I’m sorry you hate my thread. If you’re wondering, I asked the question because of a common accusation that police officers simply “manufacture crime” or something like that by arresting people for trivial matters simply because they had nothing else to do.
That’s not what I believe, incidentally. But it’s a common enough suggestion that to mention it would probably be poisoning the well - presumably police officers would have heard it often enough and feel inclined to rebut the claim, rather than answering the question I was genuinely interested in hearing views on. Since I’ve tended to disbelieve it anyway, rebuttals weren’t really what I was looking for.
I was, however, curious about what actually did happen on slow days.
None of this is to dispute the fact that examples of petty or over-zealous police officers can be found. It’s just that it’s a different question.
That’s funny because what you said was:
For some reason I don’t equate “most” with 1%. Maybe you can say what you really mean so I can decide if you are a paranoid crank or just someone I mildly disagree with.
I would say an even more common accusation is that we are not doing enough. Yes especially in poor neighborhoods. So it’s sort of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Ha! Pulling out your minority cred, are you? If I’m not mistaken, yours is no better than mine. AFAIK, minorities are no fonder of having their businesses broken into and their inventory stolen than white people are. In fact, the up-and-coming model for improving services for and relations with minority neighborhoods is community policing, which is based in large part on precisely the sort of techniques as were talking about: checking doors and calling proprietors.
Expect it? Sure. But if those expectations are not met, why would there be no consequences? And why limit this paranoid assumption of shitty behavior to cops? There are bad doctors, bad lawyers, bad plumbers, bad everything. Does that mean you don’t utilize their services to your benefit? Does that mean the ones that cross the line do so with impunity and without consequences?
I’m not sure what exactly you mean by a bad cop “sticking his head where it doesn’t belong,” but whatever it means, I don’t see why that would me that citizens would therefore have no recouse. A door check is not an blanket authorization for search and seizure without probable cause.