Posted on 02/23/2005 12:03:16 PM PST by two134711
God help the poor bastard that unknowingly wields a spatula or bbq tongs at one of the grills at the Simpsonville Park.
Simpsonville PD will probably just deploy a sniper to take him out.
Hey, if the cops are so afraid they'll get hurt if they don't take a second to know for sure, then they should have gone into another line of work.
Go into the kitchen of ANY restaurant. You should see the knives and cleavers we use.
Because in a free country you shouldn't have to clear every little thing with the local KGB or Gestapo.
Some of you people need to THINK.
Do we have liberty here, or are we going to allow this country to become a POLICE STATE?
"May I have permission to take my family out of the house and go to the public park between the hours of 1100 and 1500?"
My husband wears one too. He used to carry it in his pocket, but he lost too many knives that way. Now he carries his on his belt in a 3 inch nylon sheath. My father (school principal) used to always carry a 2-3 inch pocket knife used for opening letters, un-screwing screws, removing staples, etc.
Chief Reece is hiding behind his voice mail, and his flunky Abercrombie is playing the Roscoe P. Coltrane act to the hilt.
Flood their e-mails with instead. That might overload the server and take their computers down, though......
Unfortunately, the people who give police a bad image are those with whom many people interact on a daily basis. From simple things like not following the traffic laws they're supposed to enforce & not using radar but "estimates" to clock speeders, to plain clothes officers jumping people in public without identifying themselves, verbally harrassing citizens or threatening then with arrest, to much worse. A friend of my husband really lost a child to SIDS. I understand that when a child dies mysteriously, it must be investigated, but the parents were harshly treated like criminals, separated, interrogated and insulted. The father lost it, hit a cop, and was arrested. He should have spent the next eight hours grieving with his wife, instead he spent them in jail.
Like medicine, policing is a field where no bad apples are acceptable because our lives are at stake.
As an ex-cop, these gestapo squirrel cops need to be summarily dismissed from their jobs and the city sued for millions. Hopefully, this will occur.
There is NO reason for this behavior at ALL. These are the strongest terms I can use w/out getting banned.
really=recently
Grow a thicker skin, sister.
He should find another line of work if neither one of you can handle it. You know, it wouldn't be so bad if the good cops like your husband would stop standing by the bad ones with their Blue Wall of Silence.
I grew up in the 'hood and some of the things I've seen cops do to law abiding citizens would make you cry. Even the good cops were mad at it.
But none of them would say anything against their "brother officers".
I agree with your post - pure common sense.
This is purely anecdotal - but there are innumerable men everday around Simpsonville, SC --- the city in question --- who go about their daily business with knives/multipurpose tools (including a knife)/razor cutters on their belts in sheaths.
They go into gas stations, restaurants, etc. - no problem.
The issue here, among several issues, is selective enforcement and the targeting of a couple young boys under the supervision of their mothers.
Given that the UHU homeschooling group had been using the park at the same time every week for five years indicates to me that the cops and government teachers would have been well aware that the adults/children/teenagers in the park on Wednesday afternoons during school hours were homeschoolers.
A pissed off bitter government worker called up another pissed off government worker in order to harass law-abiding citizens and score some sort of point against the homeschoolers.
ZERO TOLERANCE policies and what they mean to EVERYONE.
If 10% of police officers are like the one in the article, then the citizenry is wel advised to avoid interactions with police officers. I know officers that I would not want to have respond to anything. One is a relative.
We should report all our movemets to the police to avoid trouble?
Why not?
"And .. why not avoid the situation all together by contacting the police in the first place and telling them who you are and what you're doing. Then a phone call about knives would have been basically ignored by the police. Just a thought."
And why not just call the cops and tell them you are just going out for dinner and a movie and please don't shoot me./Sarcasm
This news report says the one boy had a knife in a sheath on his belt. So, some mealy-mouthed "citizen" saw that and called the police pronto. For all we know, this "citizen" is some anti-homeschool hag who's had it in for this group for a long time.
Here's my take: Police across the country are trained to handle weapons situations in a way that assumes the person is a crazed killer. This is done in order to protect the LEO from crazed killers. But most people are not crazed killers, and to treat them as though they are crazed killers ought to be anathema to the USA, at least the USA that many of us older folks used to know.
But it isn't. We have traded illusory safety for freedom and liberty. That's a horribly bad trade, and most of us didn't even get to offer an opinion of it.
This is the place where somebody will argue that we voted for the legislators who created the legislation that allows this. However, legislatures pass a gazillion new bills each year, way more than we can keep up with. We don't know they've bamboozled us with some law or other till it's too late. Vote 'em out? Yeah, but the damage has been done. Just try to get the toothpaste back in the tube.
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