People seem very quick to assume the police are behaving badly, except, of course, when they need police assistance and get it. I know people who volunteer with police departments, who have worked with citizen groups involved with police departments, and who have been police beat reporters. They were pretty candid about the shortcomings of police officers; I have no illusions they are all angels. But it’s just as silly to assume they’re all Nazis, isn’t it?

http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/29/police-blackout

We’ll never get any because Arlington PD is one of the least transparent police forces in the nation. So, we get to make uninformed statements ridiculing the police. If they or you don’t like it, bring more information to the table, because my default position is that the police aren’t to be trusted. As Law and Order types like to say, “If they aren’t doing anything wrong, they don’t have anything to worry about.” So why won’t they offer more when petitioned by the public? And why is your default position that the Police are to be trusted? Just because they believe they are working in good faith, that doesn’t mean that their actions are above the public’s rightful suspicion of power.

You know, we have no idea WHAT door was slammed on the officer’s hand — whether s/he was trying to push through the front door, picking up a burnt-out firework lying next to a door, propping the door open to vent smoke, use your imagination to think of something besides your default picture of the situation.

It’s amazing how many people seem ready to believe that a cop is being an “a-hole” when s/he responds to a call involving fire marshals on the night of the year most notorious for people removing their digits and starting property fires because they want to play with fireworks. Compare pot, which only presents a danger to your neighbors if you smoke it in bed and set fire to the mattress,

Fireworks are perfectly legal in Arlington, if they are below a certain size and used outside. If, as ARLnow infers (or do you have a positive report on that?), someone was setting off fireworks *inside an apartment structure*, or on its balconies, I am tickled pink that the law responded. I’d be the first to call it in if someone was farting around with fireworks in a building where I lived.

I wonder if they teach that at the Academy…When someone won’t consent to you entering their place, stick your hand in the door as the person is shutting it, at which point the person has assaulted you and given you proabable cause to enter his or her residence.