Currently I am a law and order type of guy. I have been in the past too don’t get me wrong, but I do see the appeal of a life of crime when it comes to white collar crime like the Enron executive type bastards.
I mean there are probably 80 people skimming funds illegally in business for every 1 that gets caught. Damn fine odds for some of the bigger pay offs. But with so many ways to make the money legally I’ll stick with the safe and sound methods methinks.
But you have to look at the role of police in our lives. I respect the hell out of 90% of the police out there. They’re doing a job that I don’t know if I could do. Unfortunately, my respect of the police diminishes a little bit every year. If you had asked me what percentage of police I respected say 10-15 years ago I probably would have said 99%.
What has changed you ask?
A few things. With media trends we are starting to see the citizen type journalist with access to a camcorder and a computer able to show us things we’re not seeing on TV via YouTube or other internet video sites.
Also in the US, we’re seeing an increase of abuses of power in upper level agencies like the FBI and the CIA because of the Patriot Act. For example, I think Mark Spitzer the disgraced former Governor of New York is a dick and deserves all the punishment he got. But if it had not been for the Patriot Act he would not have been caught. You see, what got him was a SAR, or Suspicious Activity Report from his banks.
When he was moving funds around to pay for his hookers, his banks saw that the activity was outside the norm and reported it. Various law enforcement agencies got involved, surveillance was put on him and he got caught.
Now here is the thing. The Patriot Act was supposed to protect us from terrorism. I’ve got a real problem with it being used to root out prostitution rings. If someone is moving money in a suspicious manner and they are investigated for terrorist activities and they find out he’s not a terrorist, it should be case closed.
The Patriot Act gave police special powers for a purpose. Once those powers are used for a different purpose they will be used again and again in the wrong way. The parallel is the Iraq War itself. Supposedly we went to Iraq because they had WMD’s that were an imminent threat to the US. This has turned out to be bullshit and we’re pissing away billions upon billions of dollars to “maintain stability” in the middle east. The bogus reason has been usurped just like the initial Patriot Act investigation of Spitzer.
The other reason I’ve started to lose respect for police is the increase in secrecy in trying to investigate when police operations go wrong or bad. I understand that it is a hard job and respect the people who do that hard job, but they are given powers that ordinary citizens don’t have and therefore must be held to a higher standard of accountability. It’s like we learned in Spider Man people.