I suspect for the most part that departments like yours aren't causing too many problems. The departments in NYC, L.A., Chicago on the other hand.... Those are the places where the cops need to be cameraed up. There's a different mentality that I see with you and with the cops I've known in this area. Your attitude seems to be "You can have it (whatever it is, pocketknife, gun, 48 oz soda) unless you've given us a compelling reason why you shouldn't be permitted to have it." The NYC attitude is "You can't have it unless you can prove to our satisfaction that there's a compelling reason for you to have it."PawPaw wrote:Yet another reason to not live in the "Eastern Megalopolis".MarkD wrote:Pawpaw:
While I have little doubt you do your best to be honorable in how you go about your job, I've seen enough examples of cops who aren't so encumbered. Here in the Eastern Megalopolis (as Jeff Cooper called it) the attitude seems to be "I'll arrest you, then figure out why." I had a buddy hassled at a bag search in the subway because he had a two inch Swiss Army knife, he had to provide a reason why he had it (he used it at work for cutting open boxes), and had to give the cop his business card to prove he worked in a place where opening boxes was part of the job description.
I don't own any armored vehicles. I don't believe my agency does, either.So sell off a couple of those military style armored vehicles to collectors (or scrap dealers) and use the proceeds to buy cameras and memory.
That's certainly true, which brings us back to your buddy in the Megalopolis. I'm surprised that the subway didn't have cameras that would have caught the exchange you reference. If what you say is true, there should have been plenty of video evidence to help your buddy recover his property. In these latitudes, we wouldn't dream of confiscating a pocket knife. They're common, everyday apparel. For that matter, we don't ask about guns in cars,either. We simply assume that everyone has a gun (or two) in the car. That's not an issue either.As far as the storage requirements, there are ways around that. The video doesn't need to be HD quality, or even in color. The quality that comes from security cameras, with audio, would work just fine.
Why might someone think that just because a friend had a bad experience once-upon-a-time at a faraway place, that somehow it reflects on how I do my job?
My buddy didn't get his knife confiscated because he could prove to the cop he had a legitimate reason to have it. As if one NEEDS a legitimate reason to carry a pocket knife. But had it been confiscated he wouldn't have had a leg to stand on, and it would have gone down as another deadly weapon removed from the street by the NYPD. And he'd have been lucky to avoid being arrested, especially if the cop could snap the knife open by holding the blade and flicking it, thus making it the legal equivalent of a switchblade (albeit still one with a two-inch blade, the horror!). So thousands in legal/defense attorney bills over a pen knife.
There are enough cameras in NYC, including in the subway, to make George Orwell blush.
My quip about the military armored car was also for the bigger departments. NYPD a couple of those tracked APCs. What an urban police department needs with tracked vehicles is beyond me, but....
But yeah, someday I plan to move to America.