Posted in
Tim Dees on Law Enforcement on November 27th, 2006
Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com
The last couple of weeks haven’t been too warm and fuzzy for the police image. The UCLA Police zapped a student with a TASER, and got both videoed and vilified for it. Then the NYPD killed “an unarmed man,” and the community is up in arms, with Rev. Al Sharpton at the forefront. And then there is always the Los Angeles PD, the agency that liberals love to hate, who got YouTubed pepper-spraying a man in the back of a patrol car and punching another one in the face. Let’s ignore, for the moment, that independent reviews of these incidents have so far cleared the officers of wrongdoing. It’s just so much fun to believe that the cops have been caught red-handed, doing the stuff that we always knew they did, but we couldn’t prove.
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Posted in
Tim Dees on Law Enforcement on November 17th, 2006
Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com
A story in today’s Washington Post, syndicated through Reuters, sings the praises of “cop watch” activists that photograph and video-record the actions of police, using camera phones and inexpensive disposable cameras. The fruit of these roving reporters’ efforts has made national news recently in two incidents involving everyone’s favorite whipping boy, the Los Angeles Police Department.
One video clip showed an officer repeatedly punching a man in the face while he was lying on his back. The other was of an officer using pepper spray on a prisoner already in the cage of a patrol car. And, to no great surprise, both of them looked pretty gruesome and indefensible.
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Tim Dees on Law Enforcement on November 13th, 2006
Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com
Ye Olde Cop Web Site Editor got some incidental press today when he was quoted in an article for the Washington Post. The article was concerned with the recent edict of the Virginia State Police to its members, requiring that they switch from what is typically called the “ten code” to “plain speech” in their radio communications.
I wrote about this evolutionary milepost last year in an editorial, one of the first I published after coming to Officer.com. Obviously, it is still taking hold across the country, in no special progression or pattern. It is going to be difficult for the Virginia troopers, as it has been for every other law enforcement officer in the country that has been required to make the change.
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Posted in
Tim Dees on Law Enforcement on November 8th, 2006
Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com
Please do not confuse this column title with “silent but deadly,” the credo of a former patrol car partner that had a chronic and disgusting gastrointestinal disorder.
No, this deals with a threat to law enforcement officers that has been around for a long time, but is increasingly more deadly and more prevalent. And, like so many other threats (AIDS, AK-47, MS-13, etc.) it has its own acronym: MRSA.
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