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Very well.

I certainly do not agree with your opinion either on the subject. But, as you said, we both have a right to our opinions, right or wrong.

I’ll say that I’m a very STRONG supporter of Law Enforcement. I work “in the field” we’ll say, on a higher level than “a cop” does on a daily basis, and I’m well aware that there are same stellar police officers out there. In fact, the vast majority of them are “stellar”.

There are a few, very few, that are simply not suited for the job they are in. They are power mongers, and as I’ve stated in other threads, there are many jaded police officers.

I worked in a prison for a time... and I dealt daily with eradicate, strange, and even abusive criminals. They were criminals though, and had been convicted of whatever crimes they were “in for”... but that did not stop them from being hateful to the “establishment” or make excuses for why they were in prison in the first place. One tried to explain the difference in myself and him one day.

He said, “The only difference between you and I, is that *I* got CAUGHT”. In his belief, we’re all ‘criminals’ or perform criminal behavior, and cops in his opinion were no different than the inmates.

In some cases, he was correct. The security running the place were not above doing things to keep themselves from being on inmates’ hit lists. I found that deplorable.

By the same token, I expect nothing but outstanding behavior in a police officer. While I can agree that perhaps the driver in the video was being somewhat animated and was obviously upset at the situation, there was really no real reason for him to be tasered.

Any officer worth his salt should be trained enough to see that the situation wasn’t as “volatile” as everyone seems to be making it out to me.

As someone who routinely carries a weapon on my person, I have no problem in cooperating with police officers. However, I will point out that when a cop is wrong, he is plain wrong. I don’t trust my own short term memory all the time - because, very clearly, and with MUCH scientific evidence — our memories are not what they are cracked up to be. Some people are good. Most of us are not good at remembering details of everything one sees on the highway, or in a robbery or whatever. Even police officers, trained observers, can be wrong. (I act as a trained weather spotter volunteer, go through 8-16 hours of refresher training every year, and spend many hours a year practicing observations and I can not always say with 100% certainty that what I see is what I THINK I see.... and I’m just as much of a human being as any police officer.)

My point in short is, Law Enforcement officials can and do make mistakes and should NOT be given, EVER, carte blanc, that they are “always right”, they should be held to the highest possible standards, and should they falter, or fail to maintain those standards - then retraining is in order. Period.

In the time I spent in Washington, working at the White House, I can say that in eight years I ‘never once made a mistake’. That is to say, I maintained (as did the people for whom I worked, and those that worked for me) the absolute highest standards of conduct and work ethic. When you were about to do something, you re-thought it three ways and did it right the first time. If you couldn’t make a good decision, you asked for assistance, advice or turned the job over to someone else.

Police Officers should be maintaining even higher standards, and they should be held to those standards under every possible circumstance.

I will say, if someone points a gun at a police officer, then the cop has every right to defend him/herself - just as any citizen of this country has.

By having a cop point ANY device at YOU, you’re assuming that he MUST be right and legal in every aspect of every move he makes. Otherwise, a cop pointing a gun at me is no different than anyone else doing it, and I’ll certainly return fire. The point here is, they MUST be ABOVE reproach.

This officer wasn’t. Otherwise, even his own lawyers wouldn’t have questioned his actions, which they did.