02.19
Remember when we were kids and were taught that policemen are your friends? That, anytime you needed help you could look for that blue uniform and badge? Well, those days are long gone. Cops are no longer anyone’s friend but the State’s. It seems all they care about these days are their taxpayer funded lifetime pensions. Screw the citizens. It’s our job to pay their salary and submit to every random whim that comes out of their mouth. It’s their job to give us speeding tickets, rape our wallets and make our lives more complicated. And, this is exactly what 61 year old Minnie Carey found out when she asked a simple question to the cop who told her to move: “why?”
Four women, two of them well into middle age, were discussing funeral plans for a friend when an Atlanta police officer told them to move.
Three did but one asked “why.” In answer to her question, Minnie Carey, then 61, was handcuffed, put into a police wagon and taken to jail, where she was held for nine hours.
The Citizen Review Board found that Atlanta Police officer Brandy Dolson had violated APD policies and had falsely arrested Carey.
“I was blown away,” Carey told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I had heard about people in the community being harassed by the police … It really didn’t shock me as much as it probably would have if I had not heard of people going to jail for no reason. I figured I was just another one.
“But I had the right to ask ‘why’ I had to move,” she said.
The Citizen Review Board – resurrected after the 2006 fatal police shooting of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston in her home – voted in a recent meeting to sustain Carey’s false arrest claim and the allegation that the officer had violated the department’s arrest policies.
It should be no surprise that this type of thing happens over time. For a moment, push all of the propaganda out of your mind and just think about this in generic terms. What happens when you give one group of people the exclusive right to use physical force over another group of people? Remember Lord Acton’s famous words about absolute power. Well, it doesn’t just corrupt politicians. It corrupts police officers in an even more base way. Policemen have, by law, a monopoly on the use of force to make us comply with virtually anything they want us to. And we, again, by law, must disarm ourselves in their presence. That type of power cannot remain un-corrupted for long.
