Saturday, May 19, 2007

Quid Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?



If your Latin is a little rusty, that's "Who will watch the watchers?"

More on hycoprisy, courtesy of WaPo.
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2 comments:

minijonb said...

i hate off-duty cops. i have all the respect in the world for officers on duty, but i've run into some real assclowns who think they run the world when their shift is over. thanks for the post.

May 22, 2007 at 5:56:00 PM EDT
David in DC said...

My admiration for police took a real body blow in the 6 years I worked as a Legal Aid lawyer.

I dealt with them as defendant's in child support cases. Only taxi drivers and street vendors were almost as hard --- and that was because they could hide earnings because they worked a cash business.

Cops, on the other hand, thought nothing of confronting the mother's of their children, outside my presence and the court's presence, to physically intimidate and threaten them if they pursued what they were entitled to.

I dealt with them in evictions. Despite clear law to the contrary, if a landlord had a buddy who was a cop, or if a landlord WAS a cop, self-help eviction was the norm.

In DC, that's strictly illegal.

Black letter law: a DC landlord must take a residential tenant to court to evict the tenant.

Real life: If your landlord has a gun, or a cop-buddy with a gun, the law is irrelevant. Get out or get shot.

I dealt with them in domestic violence cases. Like you said, off-duty, they think the law doesn't apply to them. Especially the laws that make domestic violence a crime.

I know there are police who do a great job under difficult circumstance, but I've met too many of the other kind to dismiss them as a few bad apples.

It makes me mad and it makes me sad.

May 23, 2007 at 3:14:00 PM EDT

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