Do the authorities in your region protect you?

Well, I live in a country town with two or three policemen, and there's just too much theft for them to handle. It's not their fault.

I have no beard. I have no beard, and I must scream.

Traffic cops tend to be pretty corrupt and will cite you on occasionally comically flimsy grounds, but as far as I know the rest of the force around here is decent people.

Traffic cops are terrible here.

Wardens get too much shit from the public. Waaayy too much.

And the rest of the police are just hated so much for no apparent reason.

In my experience, law enforcement exists pretty much to harass drug users and the counterculture.

They're horribly ineffective when it comes to preventing any sort of real crime. The only ones who are worth half a dime are the guys who solve serious crimes after the fact. The rest of them are worse than worthless.

There's a police station ten minutes down the road: The thugs in blue take 30 goddamn minutes to arrive to any incident on which they could get shot, in the hopes that it's over already and they just have to pick up the pieces. I know a local cop (decent guy, works in forensics) who outright admits it's deliberate.

Truth be told, if we axed the entire police department we wouldn't be any more unsafe. At least, countercultural folks would be left the Hell alone...

edited 10th Sep '11 6:45:21 AM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

You have a bad experience.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

I concur with Erock. You just have a bad experience with them. For the majority of the UK, the police are pretty decent.

I think Birmingham wouldn't last for ten hours without the police service.

edited 10th Sep '11 6:48:14 AM by Inhopelessguy

Certainly, the upper class wouldn't... But I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

edited 10th Sep '11 7:01:17 AM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

I don't think anyone would last for ten hours without the police service, Heathen.

Especially since I live near the biggest shopping centre outside of London...

I'm not sure anybody would go looting the working class if it was open season on the rich's stuff. Presumably, the looters would have better things to ransack.

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

15,000 people across the Wet Mountain and Sangre De Cristo Range region in Colorado live with minimal if it exists at all police and they're doing alright.

edited 10th Sep '11 7:04:17 AM by MajorTom

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

In Britain, Tom. I don't know or care how the police works over there.

Totally different scenarios.

@ Heathen. Well, I'm sure widespread looting would go on. I doubt people would go all the way to Sutton Coldfield just to rob rich people.

I live in Baltimore County (recently moved out of a declining neighborhood and into one where you can't live there if you have a record), and work in the city. Still lock my doors but otherwise there isn't a real need for on-patrol police there. I've never really had a problem in the city either; Baltimore may have a high homicide rate but it's primarily gang-on-gang. Not in a gang, you'll be okay if you mind your business and have somewhere to go at night.

No one cares about rural people here Tom. Stop treating it like it's equally important to governments.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

Oh so you discriminate against folks like me because we don't live in posh cities living cosmopolitan lifestyles? I see how it is.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

No, I mean that you only make 19-21% of the population, and even that number differs from rural towns of like 1000 and where you live.

Saying that the majority of the population shouldn't have social progrms because "We don't need them here, we take care of each other" is sort of selfish.

Oh, and wait to straw man "posh cities, lavish lifestyles".

edited 10th Sep '11 7:20:15 AM by Erock

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

Almost nothing bad ever happens at my university, but the University Police seem quite effective at handling what little problems there are. In case you were wondering, they do carry guns, they didn't always but started sometime earlier in the past decade.

And back home...well, nothing really happens either, but the various town police forces in the Farmington Valley are well-equipped and generally quite competent, so we all feel quite safe.

Flora Segunda | World Made By Hand | Monster Blood Tattoo ^You should read these series.

I hate to burst your bubble, Savage, but looters don't go after what's better, they go after what's easier. Rich people are liable to be armed, have good security, etc. Malls are easy targets.

Putting aside your moral feelings on drug control, I find it amusing that you can complain that they're doing their damn jobs since drugs are illegal.

Also, to the rural thing, yes, most people live in cities. Cops simply have a harder time in the rural areas because, you know, it's fucking huge. As for Savage's "they deliberately stall" thing, I think you're putting too much faith in anecdote. In my grandma's town in Ohio there was a gun threat and there were police there in five minutes flat, so...

I am now known as Flyboy.

I complain that they spend fucktons of cash in vice enforcement, plainclothes officers searching youths for weed and busting underage folks for drinking, instead of actually tackling violent crime.

There's a plague of homophobic aggressions (a friend of mine was brutally gay-bashed last week), far-right thugs harassing minorities and lefties, violent gangs breaking and entering in houses, rapes, muggings... And the thugs in blue are basically focused on vice enforcement: Stop-and-search, entrapment, harassing prostitutes, plainclothes officers messing with the scene. That's the only thing they're good for, and that's a thing that it'd be better not to do at all.

Lately they've been messing with the gay bars, the punk bars, metalhead bars, raves and parties. The PD is not merely worthless, it's crossed the line into actively harmful territory. In my opinion, police departments should be axed: People would be equally unsafe, but we'd get left the Hell alone and get a tax cut to boot.

edited 10th Sep '11 4:15:09 PM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

As I understand it, the police are beholden to the higher-ups to a certain significant extent, in terms of what they investigate. Vice is usually a separate division from all that other stuff, too.

This also sounds more the fault of the politicians deciding on a poor place to put funding...

I am now known as Flyboy.

@Savage: How do you knw the cops don't solve a lot of those, but there still are incidents of those?

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

And how many of them are actually reported to the Police anyway? They can't (at least attempt to) act if there's not a report to go on...

Keep Rolling On

Well, I'll say the police in my neighborhood get the job done quite well and efficiently. There's one or two that get a bit overly zealous but they're offset by the entire rest of the force.

The emotions of others can seem like such well guarded mysteries, people 8egin to 8elieve that's how their own emotions should 8e treated.

Nothing posh or lavish about living in Baltimore. :p

Another thing I remember: back in my first apartment, we were woken up by our neighbors arguing loudly on the lawn just outside and it was getting pretty heated. We called the cops and they came down in a few minutes and broke them up. Obviously would have amounted to shit if we were woken by say, gunfire, but the call went out long before it came to something like that.

Same here. And they've been involved in a couple of nasty screw - ups too.

But at least most seem to do their job as best they can on the rare occasion they're truly needed, so I have no quarrels with them.

Yes. This wasn't true 15 years ago, though, as my present neighborhood used to be the local gangland, complete with brothels. Now it's just your run-of-the-mill gentrifying working-class neighborhood.