Closing Thought–08Sep20

These days the police are always in the headlines for one thing or another……and deservedly so….but most of the news is about the crimes they commit or the actions they take.

Then there are stories like this that seldom make the evening news.

Remember when you played Monopoly and we cherished the “Get Out Of Jail Free” card…..well there is really is such a thing….

Some cops give their friends and family union-issued “courtesy cards” to help get them out of minor infractions. The cards embody everything wrong with modern policing.

Mike, a white man in his 50s, was in a bad spot: He was stuck idling in traffic on New York City’s Riverside Drive, running late for a meeting, and he needed to get to the Upper East Side pronto. Hopping on the shoulder to bypass the other cars wasn’t the right thing to do, he told VICE, but he’d seen other people get away with it before.

Mike, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, said he knew it was risky—especially because the borrowed car he was driving didn’t have a license plate, let alone a registration under his name. He decided to roll the dice anyway. Right away, bad news: a traffic checkpoint, and cops pulling people over.

“That was probably the tightest spot I could’ve been in,” Mike said. “Because [the offense] could’ve been ‘driving without a plate,’ ‘driving with no registration…’” By driving on the shoulder, too, Mike was driving illegally in at least three different ways.

Despite that, he felt confident as the cop approached his car and told him to roll down his window. Instead of pulling out his driver’s license, Mike simply introduced himself and produced something better. “I just basically happened to have one of their PBA cards on me,” he said, referring to the small, plastic “courtesy” cards issued by the Police Benevolent Association, which usually have an officer’s name, phone number, and signature on the back.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-courtesy-cards

So if you are a “Friend” to the cops then you can break the law and get away with it…..

And you still can sit there and believe that the police do not need reforming?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”