Crime: Why does anyone even bother?

[gritsar]

Chicken.Lytle :

Quote:
Gritsar, can you offer some insight about abuse of power? On another forum, I read a lot of posts about misdeeds by law enforcement and prosecutors. The stories ring true as they are consistent with my experience of corporate bureaucratic laziness -- people do what is convenient or what improves their "score". I also note that a local town's PD makes a tremendous number of traffic stops that amazingly find drugs in the vehicle, triggering civil forfeiture. I cherish my civil rights and am concerned by such stories., butI cannot assess the actual situation due to the agendas of the various people relating such stories.

Do you see any of these abuses from your (or your DH's) vantage point?

And to the OP's point, CSI techniques cost money. It is much cheaper to just force a confession from a convenient perp. So, you do not see CSI techniques as a matter of course. And for high-profile cases, political pressure precludes proper prosecution or investigation (eg. OJ Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey, Anthrax, Guantanamo).

Since I can already tell where you stand, no I won't other than to say I know for a fact that my DH is a good righteous man that wouldn't take a pencil that didn't belong to him, much less plant evidence.
Are there bad cops? Sure. And there are bad doctors, bad lawyers, bad plumbers. Bad people in general, but most of them don't go to work with the very real fear that they may never come home again.
At this point in his long career, my DH is working each day mainly trying to instruct the younger officers in the proper way to deal with the public and how not to get themselves killed.​

 

[sourland]

Y' all know police officers are people too. Are all of them good guys? No, of course not, but do you want to do their job? Let's get back to the original intent of this thread and stop the "cop bashing." Please.

 

[mom'sfolly]

Police cannot search a car without a reason unless the car owner consents. Lots of dumb criminals consent to searches....doesn't mean that there aren't bad cops out there. Look up Trulia Texas for an example. I think the bad ones a very small minority, and often are lead by overzealous DAs.

That being said...even fingerprints don't work like on CSI, and DNA is a lot harder. All my working career I was in labs of various types, but never specifically with DNA. I can tell you that for most kinds of lab test, including CSI's beloved GC/MS, require quite a bit of sample prep time. Any real lab is going to run those samples against a variety of standards and other samples. They are not going to pipette a couple of things into a vial, load it on a machine, and have a result in ten minutes. I used to test for environmental contaminants on a GC. These samples had a holding time of 30 days from sample time, after that results were invalid. Sometimes we would be hard pressed to get the sample processed within the given time frame. For each gas chromatograph run we would need to run standards, spiked samples to confirm accuracy at a rate of one out of every ten samples. The kind of materials I was doing took 30-60 minutes per sample to run through the machine, and the standards had to be rerun after a certain number of hours, twelve or twenty-four. An average run took about 12 hours; after all the prep had been completed. This did not include the data crunching after the sample run. I can't imagine that a crime lab would have less stringent regulations. Even for environmental samples you need a better chain of evidence than the TV show would have you believe.

 

[arabianequine]

I was thinking the whole time I was reading this thread that there are crooks everywhere. Even some of the ones that are suppose to be solving these crimes, stopping crimes, and trying to protecting everyone when on duty. I hear about it but how often does it really happen with people you are suppose to trust?

I tried looking for a comment someone posted on facebook the other day. I can't find it but said something like.....You don't know them till you meet them. Not exactly true....I don't think I know anyone completely or ever trust anyone 100%. I trust some people I know 99%.

 

[HorseFeatherz NV]

Crime: Why does anyone even bother?

Probably as many answers to that as to - Why did the chicken cross the road?

 

[gritsar]

Quote:
The truck driver had his chance. He had the chance to make his living without drinking. That punk kid Simms had his chance too. The chance to go to prison, serve his time for the crimes he committed. He didn't have to get in a shootout with police because he didn't want to go back to prison.
It's real simple. Do the crime, do the time.
"As ye harm none, do as ye will". Don't harm anyone - by stealing from them, hurting them physically, or taking their rights away from them and you're good to go.

 

[WriterofWords]

Because of things like our bowling alley massacre that happened 21 years ago and there are still no leads. It can be gotten away with.

 

[scbatz33]

Quote:
OOOOOOOOOOOO I KNOW I KNOW!!!!!
The chicken crossed the road to demonstrate proficiency standard 3.1 of the Barnyard Poultry Standards of Competence which requires all mobile egg laying fowl to achieve mastery of independent locomotion and orienteering in unfamiliar surroundings.

 

[Chicken.Lytle]

Quote:
I think you are inferring too much about where I stand. But I think you have demonstrated my point about people having "sides" and "agendas" which make it difficult to discuss these issues.

I appreciate the work your DH does, especially training the younger officers.

 

[gritsar]

Quote:
The chicken crossed the road to show the possum that it could be done.


I thought everybody knew that.