When I was young, I dreamed of being a police officer.

Naivete, to the extreme.

The Agitator » Blog Archive » Justice Scalia, Any Comment?:

"The new professionalism in action:

Chattanooga Police Det. Kenneth Freeman will not face charges in an incident in which he shoved a 71-year-old greeter at the Wal-Mart in Collegedale to the floor after he tried to stop him while doing a receipts check."

The Agitator » Blog Archive » Yer’ Raid Update Post:

"A 19-year-old Missouri woman could get 30 years after shooting at police on a marijuana raid (her parents were apparently dealers) last month. She too says she thought the home was being robbed. In one I missed from last November, police in Woodhaven, Michigan raided and trashed the wrong home while looking for a narcotics suspect, finding instead a 25-year-old woman who had just gotten out of the shower. And in Las Vegas, 32-year-old Emmanuel Dozier is in jail and faces felony charges after shooting and wounding three police officers, also during a narcotics raid. Dozier also says he thought his home was being robbed. His girlfriend, Belinda Saavedra, was on the phone with 911 at the time of the raid.

Police insist they had the right house (Dozier has a prior arrest record in California), but found no drugs in the home.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a spot-on editorial about the last raid:

...The drug war has taught us to accept as “normal” police procedures — even in the case of a man alleged to have dealt quantities of drugs worth only a few hundred dollars — which increase the risk of violence and death in our neighborhoods.

Just as in cases where some jurisdictions have found overall fatalities could be reduced by having ambulances obey stoplights, it is those “standard” procedures that are in need of a serious new review.

For all of the “wrong-house” raids I write about on this site, even when police get the right house, these raids force a volatile confrontation with a high potential for error. There have been about a half dozen cases of police officers getting killed or wounded on drug raids in just the last few months. These tactics make warrant service more dangerous for everyone, including cops."

WendyMcElroy.com: Most ER doctors suspect police brutality:

"The national survey of 315 physicians, published in the January 2009 issue of the Emergency Medicine Journal, 'is believed to be the first doctors' account of suspected police brutality,' The survey's conclusion: 'Nearly 98 percent of emergency-room physicians report that they believe some patients were victims of suspected excessive force by police. Yet most of the suspected incidents went unreported because no laws require physicians to alert authorities.'

Other findings from the study:65.3 percent estimated treating 2+ cases of suspected excessive use of force by law enforcement officers per year. Blunt trauma inflicted by fists or feet was the most common type of injury cited. 71.2 percent did not report cases of suspected abuse. Why? 96.5 percent reported that there were no departmental policies or guidelines on how to do so; 93.7 percent said they had received no education or training in how to handle such cases. Nevertheless, 47.9 percent felt that emergency physicians should be required to report them."