Buy the police a few drinks first

… as NWA never said.

Ed Brayton posted this video earlier. It’s pretty horrendous.

So a guy’s cycling to a friend’s house, and rides his bike across the pavement to the front door when he gets there. He’d not been cycling for any real distance along the pavement, but it’s still illegal enough to apparently get hit with a $150 fine. He figures okay, it’s not worth arguing, and waits by the police car while they write out a ticket.

Someone else strolling past sees this, and chats briefly with the guy in passing, along the lines of “Oops, looks like you’re in trouble!” Just some jokey stuff as he passes, because it’s a mildly amusing scene.

The police then go after this other guy, cuff him, throw him in the van, and charge him with harassment and disorderly conduct.

The friends that the cyclist was coming to visit were filming it all. Here’s how it looked.

Now, I have two things to say about the police in general.

One:

There are numerous law enforcement officials who do an almost superhuman job on a day-to-day basis, tolerating obnoxious and/or intoxicated troublemakers with saintly patience, and risking serious harm in trying to stop violent and dangerous people from making the world a worse place. I could not do the thankless work that they do, and I hugely admire the level-headed and responsible reactions that so many of them regularly exhibit, when faced with so much vitriol and disrespect. They all deserve to be respected, because every other human deserves to be respected. I fully support police officers being remunerated handsomely, in return for having to put up with a certain amount of bullshit, such as the constant “fuck the police” attitude that some people maintain.

And two:

FUCK THE POLICE.

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As a post-script, the police don’t seem to be the ones predominantly responsible for the colossal stupidity in this other case in Michigan, where a guy edited a video to make it look like he was singing obscene lyrics to children, and now has to stay 500 feet away from anyone under 17. But it seems worth mentioning in the same context.

Oh, and as another recently discovered post-script: four hundred police in the NYPD are facing charges of bribery and larceny, after allegedly accepting “gifts” in return for making traffic tickets go away. Yep. Fuck ‘em.