It’s becoming more and more obvious that a significant chunk of today LEO’s have more interest in oppressing law-abiding residents than they actually do in protecting them.
I get the feeling that many of them act like Officer Peterson not because they are following the laws of their state,city, etc - but because it’s a control issue for them. They want to be the arbiters of what you can say, do etc.
I believe it was in Maryland recently where an officer told a citizen to stop filming him by saying that the person didn’t have any f***ing rights.
We are seeing the future of law enforcement, folks. It’s just not an East Coast thing either. It’s definitely spreading across the rest of this nation.
I still hold to the “bad apple” theory, in that the vast majority of LEOs are reasonable, within their rules.
Many years ago, somebody got a rude but accurate cop quote, that “the typical cop is like a (homosexual), in that if you (have sex) with him, he’ll (have sex) with you right back, but harder.” So, ahem, reverse ‘golden rule’ with cops. It is their unwritten rules.
Importantly, there are two very critical provisions to this.
The first is that the FBI and DEA both admit that there is considerable abuse of anabolic steroids by police, and combined with high stress levels, this can make a cop an unpredictable time bomb. This is exacerbated by police not wanting to crack down on one of their own.
The second problem is all the other problems combined, to include bribery, gambling, prostitution, narcotics, and good old fashioned mental illness.
But a single cop, or a peer-pressure group of cops reflects on the rest of their department, no matter how many good cops there are.