Two sets of rules: One for the public and a very different set for police

By David McElroy · May 24, 2012

As I was approaching the ramp to get onto I-59 in Birmingham Wednesday, I noticed in my rearview mirror that there was a police car behind me. I don’t know about you, but I start worrying a bit while they’re behind me. Is it past time to renew my tag? Do I have a tail light out? What’s the speed limit on this little road?

I was hoping he wasn’t turning onto the interstate, so I was watching his turn signal in my mirror to see if it came on. It never did — but he turned behind me anyway. Part of the way down the ramp, the asphalt widens, but the lane for the interstate hasn’t started, so you’re supposed to stay on the ramp. He didn’t. Part of the way down the ramp, he floored his engine and went around me, going through the striped lines you’re supposed to stay away from.

In the time I could still see him, he impatiently tailgated a car and then passed it way too close to a car in the other lane. He lost me after that, but it doesn’t really matter what he did. He has a gun and a badge, so he can do whatever he wants.

Have you ever noticed how flagrantly many police officers violate the traffic rules we’re supposed to obey? I routinely see them speeding (without emergency lights), tailgating and failing to use turn signals. There’s one set of rules for us, and there’s another set for them. Is there any wonder that more and more people are losing respect for police?

Police almost never get into trouble for what they do driving. Even when they do get stopped for something — even for more serious offenses such as drunk driving — other officers routinely let them go. The euphemism for it is “professional courtesy.” In reality, it’s a “Get out of jail free” card for police who do almost any offense that another officer can justify as minor.

When I noticed the officer Wednesday afternoon driving in a way that would get a citizen ticketed, I mentioned it on Facebook and immediately got a flood of responses from people who see the same thing routinely. My friends seemed irritated at the double standard, but resigned to the reality that we can’t do anything about it. Isn’t this a perfect recipe for loss of respect for police?

I wrote about a New York City officer who was caught on video making serious threats to local men. There were other officers with him, but if this video hadn’t existed, it’s a sure bet that they would have sworn none of this ever happened — because that’s what many police officers do. They lie and break rules for each other. They hold themselves above the law in the interest of what they see as a higher good. They see themselves as something like vigilantes on the street protecting us — and they frequently see the legal rules as getting into their way.

More and more, police are willing to break the rules — sometimes about small things and sometimes about big things. Quickly, the problems are bigger than just flagrant disregard for traffic rules. Soon it’s beating suspects and planting evidence and lying about what happened in order to get a bogus search warrant.

The Cato Institue has just taken over a project to report on this kind of misconduct — to shine a light on something that’s a cancer for a free society. It’s at PoliceMisconduct.net, and it promises to be a good resource for anyone who is naive enough to believe that police in this country aren’t out of control.

It’s still true that police in totalitarian countries are far worse than our police. There’s no question that we’re safer from our police than many people are from theirs. But I’m honestly worried about the direction in which things are going.

I don’t trust police and I frequently have no respect for them today. Respect is something that’s earned, not something that’s given just because you have a uniform and a gun. Many of today’s police seem to believe they’re the masters and we’re the underlings. It’s way past time to force them to remember that they’re our servants, not the other way around.

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Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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