Good Work or the Presumption of Guilt?

I don’t normally criticize police officers.
They do dirty, hard work in a dirty, hard world and they don’t get nearly the amount of respect and appreciation from us as they deserve. I’ve seen them catch a lot of very undeserved grief in the years I’ve worked for police departments myself.

On the other hand, police departments have a real problem with overzealousness, especially when they think that they’re protecting some group or another. You see this overzealousness more than you might think – with things like seatbelt checkpoints (especially where night vision goggles are involved) and juvenile alcohol patrols. Departments think they’re doing a wonderful job of protecting the children or protecting you from yourself, when, really they’re jsut throwing a dragnet over the citizenry and tossing back the people they don’t think are guilty.

Oftentimes, everyone’s guilty unless they can prove themselves otherwise. That’s backwards, but that’s also how these things work. It’s one of the reasons that a lot of places have prohibited police from doing sobriety checkpoints – the presumption of innocence.

It looks like there may have been another bit of serious overzealousness and a serious presumption of guilt in Montgomery County recently, where police effectively cordoned off a neighborhood block and tested every juvenile coming out of a single house for alcohol. After finding that there was no juvenile drinking, they proceeded to write parking citations to several cars on the street for such violations as parking with tires on the curb.

Like I said, I’m a big fan of the police. But I also recognize a temper tantrum when I see it. This surely looks like one of those times when the officer in charge of the scene didn’t get what he wanted so he decided to punish the perceived offense in another way.

That may not be true, and I could be completely wrong about it, but I don’t believe I am. I’ll have to wait to see if there is any news from the Department’s investigation.

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Category: The Good Old US of A