koxinga, if by “own approach to law enforcement” you mean we’re doing really good for a city of our population with the dangerously low number of officers on the force, then I guess we’re guilty of having less violent crime than other metro areas due to “our approach”.
Violating rights never ends up helping with Law and Order. However, Houston has a violent crime rate of **1132. **
Cities by population
NYC =614.
LA= 718
Houston= 1132.
Phoenix = 724
Phil= 1475
San Antonio= 556
San Diego=502
Dallas = 1069
San Jose= 402.
In other words, of the ten largest cities (we don’t have good data for Chicago) your city has the second highest violent crime rate, nearly 3X that of the lowest (San Jose). You are not doing “really good”. Sorry.
drdeth, according to worst-city.com, houston isn’t that high on the list. so I guess we can throw stats back and forth, or we can not… this isn’t a debating forum, so it’d be pointless to point out that ny and chicago (#1 and #2 police forces by # of officers) have more officers per person than we do, and are in worse condition crime-wise.
Considering how much police work is actually paper work, don’t your superiors and ADAs complain about the all lower case no carriage return thing?
Okay, I did get a little carried away there. I should have said “A hell of a lot of cops won’t report their co-worker’s misdeeds”. See dustinsquarepants post, above, mentioning snitches. So, I’ll modify my claim to be a simple generalization.
Maybe it would help if the whole police society would be a little less secretive?
I don’t know.
Well, DSyoungesq probably failed the police IQ test, since he got into law school.
But how can you be 100% certain that he couldn’t be a police officer? It’s not a job that requires an inordinate amount of inborn talent.
Do I count three cops in this thread?
Cops who are not dustinsquarepants, I invite you to register your opinion of dustinsquarepants’ presentation of his profession in this thread.
ETA: Apologies if you already have and I missed it.
Has anyone addressed the cop says “he said he would consent to the search” angle ?
Because that seems to be one friggin big loophole when its just you and the po-po in the middle of nowhere.
I think someone said that the department would investigate if they got several complaints of an officer doing that.
thanks for the input on the thread, but that “fact” seems to be about as useless as tits on a boar hog when it comes to them searching your vehicle!
Not shooting the messenger here, just the message 
Sure, it can happen and probably does now and then.
However, MOST of us aren’t willing to risk our careers just to get a look in your car. Get caught, you’re out.
First, I don’t care what the justification, I won’t tarnish the badge by lying.
Second, you could always have a recording device in your car, or some bystander could be filiming.
Third, Hi Opal! (always wanted to do that, even if most people think it’s stupid)
Yeah, he doesn’t make us look good. Too defensive and arrogant for my tastes, and he obviously hasn’t been on the job very long.
A lot of that comes from the agency for which you work. Each one develops a personality, and some can be very arrogant. It’s just how he’s learned to present himself, and doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s a bad person or a bad cop.
People will always be able to lie. That’s arguably a large part of what the constitution tries to address. The court is, among other things, a truthfinding body. Evidence gets tossed out not because we want guilty people to go free, but because we find that it’s the best way to keep the cops and prosecutors from lying by falsifying evidence. We have the right to confront witnesses to have the opportunity to show they are lying when they claim you consented, and the results of that search get thrown out.
Barring magic lassos, there is no real way to stop a cop from lying about what he saw or what evidence he found. But the system has rules in place to minimize the damage done. One of the most effective steps being taken (as was mentioned above) is the addition of cameras to patrol cars. But even that won’t stop the cop from abusing their authority if they want to – it just makes the costs for the officer (and the rest of the enforcement system) higher.
Actually, yes, you did say you did it. “We” includes the person making the comment. And based on your other comments here, I would have little reason to believe a statement on your part that you do not do it, just your fellow officers.
I don’t have a “grudge” against you. Nor can I be certain what kind of officer you are. But I do know that you have asserted approvingly that an officer in Texas (actually, as it turns out, Houston, Texas, but hey, what the heck, why not tarnish the whole state while you are at it!) does not need to worry about things like warrants and consent, because you’ll simply engage in a pretext arrest and then use that arrest to engage in an inventory search of the vehicle, and if you don’t find anything, then unarrest the person. In other posts directed at mangeorge, you have asserted, in essence, that the end justifies your means. This is directly contrary to the whole spirit and moral underpinnings of our Constitution, especially the contents of Amendments 4 and 5 and 6, which make it clear that we as a nation are more concerned about the “means” than the “ends.” Even if we are CERTAIN in our minds that a person is “guilty,” we prefer to allow that person to maintain his/her liberty and privacy until such time as we have VALID reason to curtail it. Our hunches, suspicions, even well-founded conjectures on the subject are not valid reason to curtail the liberty and privacy of the people who live here in the United States.
As an attorney, I have a ton of respect for officers of the law. And in my dealings with society, I’ve had no good reason to lose that respect in general; all my dealings with officers have been generally professional. I also understand, albeit from the outside in terms of the criminal system, how vitally important it is to have trustworthy officers for the proper and efficient administration of justice in America. THAT is why I find the concept that the ends justify the means employed to be something that requires a sharp rebuttal. That sort of approach, in the long run, does nothing to help justice, and indeed hurts it tremendously. If you don’t believe me, ask someone like Bricker, who has worked both sides of the criminal law milieu. Or, if that’s not satisfactory, ask your fellow officers on this message board.
So it’s not you I have a grudge against. But the idea you have proffered needs to be shot down swiftly and surely. It must be stamped out wherever it takes root. It is anathema to our people; it undercuts our whole society and the social contract we enter into. I shall ridicule it wherever I see it, argue against it most vehemently, and portray it for what it is: the Anti-American Way.
As for your “morality” as an officer, I have only what you have said to base my judgment upon. I’m not the only one with some reservations on that basis, you will note. :dubious:
ds, no, I said “we” because it feels weird saying “they” when I’m referring to my co-workers. I don’t know what I said that comes off as arrogant, but to quote the dude, “that’s just like, your opinion, man” and is no skin off my back.
I said previously I hadn’t been on the force very long, so thats nothing you’re discovering about me. my whole intent has been to answer the op’s question, and it has indeed been answered. this debate about what kind of cop I am is irrelevant, and will never prove anything because unless you get stopped by me or arrested by me, you have no clue to how arrogant or nice I really am.
p.s: and all of our reports are either all caps, or written in block (caps) letters. the way I type on here does not reflect on my grammar or spelling in the real world.
IRL (in the real world) is passe.
This is the real world. :eek:
Now go to your room.
I’ll speak up in your defense. What you said at the first of the thread may have been shocking, but the law in Texas was pretty much what you described, at least before the new U.S. Supreme Court decision. After Atwater, you could (and can) arrest for almost any traffic infraction in Texas, so there was nothing stopping law enforcement from arresting for a minor traffic violation commited in their view as a pretext for searching the vehicle, which some wryly referred to as “search incident to citation.” It didn’t seem to happen all that often, though; law enforcement seemed to realize that it was probably the search that least passed the “smell test” even if it looked legal on paper and generally preferred to look for clearer justification, like the automobile exception.
Record every single traffic stop that is carried out on video with audio. Dual dvd. The person stopped gets a copy, and the police get a copy. Problem solved.
Please. It’s a little late in the thread for the “I wasn’t talking about me” defense.
(bolding mine)
I guess that last bolded part didn’t imply that you will have a car 'inventoried" when you want to search but don’t have probable cause, eh? I doubt one person here is buying that, as what you said “is what it is.”
What did this mean in the context koxinga was talking about? It didn’t mean that arresting and inventorying a car so you could get around not being legally able to search a vehicle without justifiable probable cause as being “good for a city of our population”?
Is that what you believe? That most officers will pull cars over for driving at 3 a.m. in a ghetto? And that they will try to search a car for that reason? And that driving late at night in a ghetto gives most cops “a hunch” that there’s something illegal in the car?
You obviously believe that most cops aren’t as moral as yourself, do you? Because you’re not part of “most cops”, right?
Really?:
fantome, the only statement there that I use “I” was the one in the middle of your post, and I admit, it was written a little hastily. but the fact remains, I haven’t been on that long and don’t have the experience to know which cars are going to be the bad guys’s ones, so I haven’t had a need to practice these methods. and the last sentence isn’t arrogance, its a true statement, forgive me for having pride in doing what I do that everyone can not