How do police harrass people

[my_e36 43]

Recently, the Toronto Police Services board 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?" From the "other side" (the law

enforcement side) Sgt Berezowski a cop with a sense of humor (or

reality) replied:

"First of all, let me tell you this...it's not easy. In Toronto 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 neighbour is beating his

wife" is a code phrase we often use. This means we'll come out and give

some special harassment. Another popular one is, "There's a guy

breaking into a house" or "So and so has a grow op." 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 licence 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, are drunk, or have a warrant.

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 PHONE 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,

Liquor Act, 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 a while until you find someone violating one of these

listed offences and harass them. Just last week I saw a guy smash a car

window. 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.

I 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

keep the streets safe for them. Next time you are in my town, give me a

single finger wave. That's another code word.

[Jazzbass 1]

LOL - I like it!

[Dnz 0]

hahah totally badass.

[westy 614]

Brilliant :thumb:

[EuroBoy 0]

Thats a good read.

I like that cop.