Police Harassment

[68TriShield]

Police Harassment (From the Police Humor Site)

Recently, the Chula Vista, California Police Department ran an e-mail forum (a question and answer exchange) with the topic being, "Community Policing."

One of the civilian email participants posed the following question, "I would like to know how it is possible for police officers to continually harass people and get away with it?"

A Sergeant, obviously a cop with a sense of humor, replied:

"First of all, let me tell you this...it's not easy. In Chula Vista, we average one cop for every 600 people. Only about 60% of those cops are on general duty (or what you might refer to as "patrol") where we do most of our harassing.

The rest are in non-harassing departments that do not allow them contact with the day to day innocents. And at any given moment, only one-fifth of the 60% patrollers are on duty and available for harassing people while the rest are off duty. So roughly, one cop is responsible for harassing about 5,000 residents.

When you toss in the commercial business, and tourist locations that attract people from other areas, sometimes you have a situation where a single cop is responsible for harassing 10,000 or more people a day.

Now, your average ten-hour shift runs 36,000 seconds long. This gives a cop one second to harass a person, and then only three-fourths of a second to eat a donut AND then find a new person to harass. This is not an easy task. To be honest, most cops are not up to this challenge day in and day out. It is just too tiring. What we do is utilize some tools to help us narrow down those people which we can realistically harass.

The tools available to us are as follows:

PHONE: People will call us up and point out things that cause us to focus on a person for special harassment. "My neighbor is beating his wife" is a code phrase used often. This means we'll come out and give somebody some special harassment.

Another popular one is, "There's a guy breaking into a house." The harassment team is then put into action.

CARS: We have special cops assigned to harass people who drive. They like to harass the drivers of fast cars, cars with no insurance or no driver's licenses and the like. It's lots of fun when you pick them out of traffic for nothing more obvious than running a red light. Sometimes you get to really heap the harassment on when you find they have drugs in the car, they are drunk, or have an outstanding warrant on file.

RUNNERS:
Some people take off running just at the sight of a police officer. Nothing is quite as satisfying as running after them like a beagle on the scent of a bunny. When you catch them you can harass them for hours.

STATUTES: When we don't have PHONES or CARS and have nothing better to do, there are actually books that give us ideas for reasons to harass folks. They are called "Statutes"; Criminal Codes, Motor Vehicle Codes, etc... They all spell out all sorts of things for which you can really mess with people.

After you read the statute, you can just drive around for awhile until you find someone violating one of these listed offenses and harass them. Just last week I saw a guy trying to steal a car. Well, there's this book we have that says that's not allowed. That meant I got permission to harass this guy. It is a really cool system that we have set up, and it works pretty well.

We seem to have a never-ending supply of folks to harass. And we get away with it. Why? Because for the good citizens who pay the tab, we try to keep the streets safe for them, and they actually pay us to "harass" some people.

Next time you are in my town, give me the old "single finger wave." That's another one of those codes. It means, "You can't harass me."

It's one of our favorites.

[Mattso3000]

Very nice.

[14holestogie]

[Ogre]

[CigarNut]

I had to forward than on to an friend who is an LEO!

[363]

[kydsid]

Beagle on the scent of a bunny....LOL Nice

[never_enough]

I like it

[markem]

I heard that you can get out of any jam just by calling the officer, "dude".

[hammondc]

Forwarded to my LEO brother. Good stuff.

[icehog3]

Originally Posted by markem

I heard that you can get out of any jam just by calling the officer, "dude".

Yes, another anti-harassment tactic.

[cobra03]

. Love it

[shilala]

Hilarious.
Were I an officer, the best way to avoid harassment would be to run. I'm not chasing anyone, especially if I'm having coffee, or if they're wearing those $200 Nikes. Not gonna happen, period.

[icehog3]

Originally Posted by shilala

Hilarious.
Were I an officer, the best way to avoid harassment would be to run. I'm not chasing anyone, especially if I'm having coffee, or if they're wearing those $200 Nikes. Not gonna happen, period.

Taser with a 32' range.

[jledou]

"only three-fourths of a second to eat a donut AND then find a new person to harass"

Unbelievably fast ... now I have a whole new respect for those harassers err I mean officers

[G G]

Awesome.

[68TriShield]

Originally Posted by icehog3

Taser with a 32' range.

Or a K9

[icehog3]

Originally Posted by 68TriShield

Or a K9

Woof.

[blugill]

One of my friends and cigar buddies here in town is also the crime reporter for the paper.
He spends time with the police daily and knows them all very well and jokes with them constantly.

He told me of a story where two officers were recently promoted to sergeants and they overheard an African American gentleman come in to complain that his son had been harassed by an officer after being pulled over.

The desk officer took down all of the information which the newly minted sergeants didn't hear, instead they went to records and asked for this man's name to be pulled up. They found out he didn't have a valid license so as soon as the gentleman left they got into their cruiser and pulled him over.

They were quickly embarrassed when he produced a valid driver's license, turns out the records officer misspelled the man's name and got it all wrong!

So the embarrassed sergeants went back to the station where my friend knew exactly what had happened, his reply to them?

"So, how did you like being sergeants for a day?"

True story!

Nice!!