The Texas Tornado, Houston criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett, isn’t one to hang out at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center all day long waiting for something fun to happen. He goes out and finds it, and he’s done it again in this post. That’s why he was voted the best criminal law blawger around.
Bennett has taken notice of the growth of cop blogs, and lists a few of his favs.
- If you got stopped….you deserved it
A motorcycle cop. - Officer “Smith”: Thoughts From Behind the Badge
A California cop. - The LawDog Files
A Texas cop, but not an enemy of the Fourth Amendment. - Cop n’ attitude
Officer Krupke, Somewhere in America.
I started reading, and frankly, found it incredibly hard to stop. These are simply fascinating. And there are plenty more, from the venerable Beat and Release to the depth of The Philosophical Cop. While each brings a slightly different twist on a remarkably common theme, my favorite is the first one listed by Bennett, If you got stopped….you deserved it. Not only does our dirty talking motorcycle cop have plenty of stories about the really bad people who speed, but he’s got a marvelous way of telling them which makes it almost sounds as if he wasn’t totally insane.
Once I started reading the cop blogs, I found myself mesmerized. If ever there was good reason to blog anonymously, this was it. These were posts straight from the heart, if not the mind, of real cops. They smelled real. They tasted real. They were real. If they had to put a name to them, you can bet that they would be utterly worthless and totally official. This is what goes on in the mind of an officer when they are free to tell it as they see it.
No sense in my telling you any more about these blogs when you can read them yourself. One warning: Put aside a good hour of your life to read and absorb. Once you start, you’re going to keep reading and reading. If you ever wondered whether your view of cops was a product of prejudice or paranoia, these will put the question to rest and answer all of your doubts.
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I’m glad he did. I’ve been reading Lawdog for years — we have some mutual friends; like everybody else in the online gun world, he knows Oleg — but the other three were new to me.
The “online gun world?” Is that where you shoot digital bullets at ethereal targets?
Oh, come on, you know he humped his way to that award.
In a peculiar manner of speaking, that’s more true than you know.
It’s where we talk All Things Guns and occassionally meet in the real world to do some shooting.
Lawdog is one of my daily reads. He might be a peace officer but he’s a big champion of protecting rights – which also explains the need for some annonymity as not everyone in the law enforcement community share such views and sometimes create problems for those who do.
There’s also more than a little bit of humor in his posts (something lacking in the forums in places like officer.com). In fact, forget the blogs, if you want to see the Best of the Finest, have a look at the online police forums.
Here I’m trying to tweak Jdog a bit, and then some Texan comes up behind me all serious-like. Sheesh.
Thanks for the plug! I thought something was wrong when I checked my analytics and statcounter. After a while, I found you and Mark Bennett. Both of you mentioned the blog today and my hits just about doubled!
I love expanding my readership and reaching new people. Like I mentioned to Mark, I may not always say things you agree with, being on the opposite side of the bench, but I will always be honest and try to be as entertaining as possible. Oh, and by the by…”slumming”? Nice, dude. Really nice. 🙂
Damn. And here I was, spending all day composing a thoughtful reply that just barely fit within your 3000-character limit. Oh, well; the bit-bin never does fill…
I’m here to
protect andserve.I’m very impressed with how frank you are, and think that people here can learn a great deal about the differences in how lawyers and cops view things. And, if nothing else, you are indeed entertaining.
Thanks for sharing these blogs. It does not surprise me yet it is scary that people like this are “Protecting” us. The question is how do we protect ourselves from them.
PS As for Motor cop I am sure that there is professional help available to you and it is nothing wrong in admitting a sociological issue, it is the only way to do something about it.
Yeah, sure, motor cop is entertaining. I guess he needs an outlet for not feeling silly enforcing these silly protect-the-public-from-itself laws. On the other hand he needs to pay the rent. What a depressing job he’s got. Expecting to get his feet kissed any minute by all those knuckleheaded assclowns of drivers in exchange for the grace of a mere warning.
But that’s the part of Motorcop’s posts that are most enlightening, the aspect of control over people, his disdain for citizens, his petty payback for their attitudes toward him and his badge. This is where we learn the most.
Yup. It’s possible to do traffic enforcement and tie into the public service metapurposes of it, and, yup, there are several, and I do know cops who do that. Ralph Avery, my boss back when I was a security clerk, a few decades ago, was capable of waxing philosophical about parking enforcement on a college campus, and took it seriously. I hope I don’t sound like I’m making fun of Ralph — I respected the guy a lot for going whole hog into what most folks (and I include myself in on this) think of as trivial, and I like and respect geekitry.
Motormouth’s scorn for the public — collectively and individually — is pretty stereotypical, as is his pettiness. What I find most interesting, though, and not at all stereotypical, are the candid admissions — he explicitly says that if he wants to search somebody’s car, he’ll “develop [my emphasis] probable cause,” (and I don’t buy the pravda that his apologists leaped to provide on his behalf) and then, if he doesn’t like the Guest of Honor’s attitude, trash the car during the search.
Hey, wasn’t this about where I came in? Some discussion about a bully cop with a fetish for tasering people who don’t respect his authoritah?
That’s very funny that you should say that. That was my favorite part as well. This is at the crux of the 4th Amendment issue, our pal asserting that he has the power to manufacture probable cause at will, and implicitly will walk into court and so testify, regardless of whether there was cause or not.
Isn’t this the point we’ve been trying to make all along?
“I won’t go to court on a guess. I’m not in for looking like a jackass in court.” Motorcop has thought this through.
You need to include the preceding sentence: “I don’t stop folks that I am not 100% sure have committed a violation.” It’s tough being a motorcycle cop, what with all them pseudo-speeders around. They just look like they’re moving fast.
; ]
That was my favorite part as well.
Great minds run in the same gutter, as some wag said.
And, yeah. There’s days when I think it makes a small difference; today’s one of them.
On a more serious note, I have good reason to believe — as in “folks who know more about this than I do have explained it to me” — that pretty much any cop who wants to can, while staying within the letter of the law, pull over pretty much any car. (Easy check, for me: when driving on the Crosstown, I rarely [read: never] drive at the speed limit of 55 — come and get me, copper; I won’t resist arrest. If I’m going, say, 60, every car ahead of me that I don’t pass is subject to being pulled over for exceeding the speed limit, just like I am.)
That doesn’t bring us to a search, although (and I hope you’ll tell me how wrong I am) a quick compound question, say, “You don’t have any drugs in the the car and you don’t mind if I search, do you?” with a response of “No,” (officially meaning that he doesn’t mind, of course, not that he’s saying the car is narcotics-free) does, at least much of the time, and even absent that, any number of other things (a “furtive motion”, a baggie of white powder lying on the seat, whatever) does much, if not all, of the rest…
(Again, for those who came in late: I’m not a lawyer; I just hang out with some, from time to time, and knowledge and misinformation can rub off.)
Now, even absent lying or or “developing” PC (both of which are not utterly unknown) we’ve got a cop able to search almost any car he feels like, while apparently (see above) staying within the letter of the law, as interpreted by the Supremes.
I may have missed something in one of the Federalist papers, but I don’t think that exactly was what the Framers had in mind.
Assuming that a police officer wouldn’t lie about an infraction, chances are good that nobody can drive for any extended period of time without breaking a law, giving rise to a legitimate stop. But from there, it becomes far more fact specific. The best I can explain is that cops often use the wrong excuse for the search, as shown in their report, opening the door to challenge. Unless there is a recording, the cop’s report becomes the only evidence of the reason for the search, and the defendant’s challenge to the cop’s explanation is a swearing contest where the defendant is usually the loser. But there are a wide variety of factors that go into the equation, which fortunately offers a more significant basis to challenge bad searches than one might suspect.