Saturday, May 27, 2006

Should this make me feel better? Or not?

Y'all know I have a thing about police raids of private citizens' homes, fueled partially by what I read at the Agitator and partially by my own experiences as the sister of a felon.

The general theory about such things is that small towns got a whole lot of Homeland Security and, being small town cops, were more inclined to use said money on weapons that on training a real SWAT team.

But according to Thought Mechanics this isn't just an American thing.

At TM, guest blogger Heather K. Dahlstrom writes about the case of a Canadian dentist who had his credit card stolen. The credit card company cancelled his account and sent him a new card, yet kept the old card active as to try to track down the criminals. The old card was used to purchase a bunch of kiddie porn off the web.

This resulted in a confusion wherein he ended up being arrested, having his frearms liscense revoked and being genrally harrassed, ending when police took a battering ram to his door at 6:20 a.m. one morning in a sting that revealed not only no porn, but that the man didn't even have his computer hooked up to the internet.

The dentist's lawsuit against the Toronto and York region police has my blessing.

When people around me start threatening to move to some country that they are sure is better than America, I tend to assume that the same obnoxious stuff goes on there. In this case, it looks like I'm right.

CC

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

People are people all over the world. Power corrupts. People who are used to no power get heady when they get a little power. It's a human thing. We are maybe more prone to getting carried away with it than some others because of our culture, but everybody is susceptible. I imagine some cultures are worse than ours -- like maybe in the Middle East?

Chalicechick said...

I don't know that we are that much more prone to getting carried away with our power.

I mean, we think of the French as refined and the French revolution was the very definition of getting a little power and getting carried away with it.

CC

Anonymous said...

I suspect that at the time of the French Revolution, it was mostly the upper classes that were refined. Course, they had already gotten carried away with power, that's why they had a revolution.... Am I arguing both sides again? :-)


[the word verification thingy is strangly appropriate to this subject; royrzuse]