I must say, when I saw and heard that I clenched my teeth, closed my eyes and shook my head. First people complain that there's too much violence in the cities. If you saw all the headlines I see on the news every single morning before I go to work, you'd wonder whether or not I was completely out of my mind for ever leaving the house at all! And now this??
Kids are so far out of control that our tax dollars now have to go to city police officers maintaining permanent posts at just about every school in all of our surrounding districts. Metal detectors are in schools. A Kindergartner recently was found with something like $50,000 worth of crack on him in school. No Shit! Are you kidding me??
I recently posted a pic I took with my cell phone on twitter and facebook of a bum sleeping in a big flower pot on the side of an extremely busy intersection in the heart of Springfield in the middle of the day. I'm not joking. People were just walking by on the street like its no big deal.
Another story I heard on the news was an issue of children standing on the side of the road and throwing rocks at cars as they pass by. Several accidents were reported and a hale storm of damaged cars were reported in the area. No arrests were made. http://www.wwlp.com/dpp/news/local/hampden/several-cars-hit-by-rocks-in-spfld?ref=scroller&categoryId=20023&status=true
One of my local police officers is now pressing charges against a man for attempted murder. The officer was asked to accompany a woman to her estranged husband's house to collect her things safely. Its the officer's job to go with her to keep the peace. The husband went nuts and attacked the officer without warning pummeling him in the head so many times that the officer had to call for back up and was then taken to the ER where he had to have his scalp stitched back on. Again, no joke. http://www.wwlp.com/dpp/news/Accused-police-attacker-in-court
Should officers be allowed to use force? Should officers be allowed to use ACCESSIVE force?? YES!!!!!! They absolutely should and quite frankly, I wish they'd do it more often!!
Did you know that in high crime areas judges are LESS LIKELY to stick that little extra charge of 'battery on a police officer', or 'evading police' because they don't want to be bothered with all the extra work? Did you know that? They look at the biggest charges on the list that the police provide and simply ignore the rest.
Because of this, criminals don't mind fighting to flee from police. And of course the adverse affect this has on cops can go one of two ways: They either give up and do nothing to fight crime, or they get mad and snap, beating people in the streets within an inch of their lives (which I personally don't mind. Tough love, I say).
If charges were pressed against EVERYONE for EVERY charge they incur, believe me, they'd think a HUNDRED times before doing something stupid. They wouldn't be so inclined to throw rocks at cars. They wouldn't feel so comfortable lighting up a crack pipe or doing a drug deal right in front of the local convenience store at 1:00pm in the afternoon. They'd think twice if they knew they'd go to jail for EVERY SINGLE illegal act they're performing.
So YES, the police should be doing everything and anything they can to stop these criminals from taking over our cities. And the rest of us good folks who work hard for our money and simply do all we can to be a good person, we should be supporting our officers and not giving in to every little smack head with puppy dog eyes that says they were treated unfairly ANOTHER chance.
Oh, and by the way, whatever happened to the 3 strikes laws???? See? That's the judicial system making their money and letting criminals go. After all, without criminals they'd be unemployed like 80% of the rest of our suffering country. We cant have that......O_O......Please support our officers. They need us more than you think.