A cop won’t stand by and watch a stabbing, the vast majority of the time. But they’ll definitely take their time helping you in a less stabby situation, depending on where you live. I’m moving out of the industrial part of my city next week, and I fully expect that the next time someone busts my car window, I won’t be waiting three to four hours for a bored desk-jockey to drive up and take down the details.

Just remember that order is often a euphemism.

But the best way to have avoided this disaster in Oakland would have been a decision NOT to send riot police, armed with teargas, flashbangs, etc. to forcibly disperse a crowd engaged in peaceful disobedience.

There is no way in which the actions of the police (as an organisation more than the actions of specific officers) can be defended in this instance. It is not as if the officers suddenly found themselves in an unexpected situation – they chose to deploy with the specific special-purpose weaponry to do exactly what they did.

By “pretty cool” you mean treating you like an American citizen, right?

I couldn’t quite articulate why “they are acting pretty cool” bothered me, but you hit the nail on the head.

When we start saying things like, “Wow.  These officers aren’t being assholes!  They aren’t treading on our rights as American citizens!  That’s awesome!” Then … well, we know there is a problem.  That shouldn’t be notable.  It should be the norm.

Okay, now I’m just being disruptive.

yes, budget cuts to the fire department. You made that point about someone who died.

And what’s your point? That the police are callous assholes? Uh huh.

Wow, that IS easy!

You don’t seem to understand that some of us, some of us with SLIGHTLY more complicated opinions than your straw man there, understand that law is not the same as morality.  We understand that legality is a matter of FACT, not of opinion.  We know that actions have consequences, even when those actions are justified and those consequences are unfair.  We know that doing the right thing sometimes comes with a cost, ESPECIALLY when dealing with a corrupt system that will stop at nothing to protect itself.  It’s naive to think the government is just going to say, “hey, you’re right, we are rotten, we were just waiting for someone to notice.  Here, take over, will you?  Let me get the launch codes for the nukes for you; those are kind of important and the last time I lost them Panetta got soooo mad.”

So no, we don’t support Hitler.  We just understand that if you were to defy Hitler, you’d end up shot or in a concentration camp.  That doesn’t mean we’d be against defiance, or that we wouldn’t pay that price ourselves.

I guess it’s better than being called a troll every time I take a reasonable approach that happens to differ from their own.

Hell, their actions are less damaging and more respectful than even those of the Boston Tea Party (which was actually quite a large scale destruction of private property). I can only surmise that anyone who complains “but it’s against the law” when it comes to the Occupy movement would have supported the British in the Revolution or Hitler in Nazi Germany – both of those had “the law” on the their side too. Ethics are more important than laws, and they are certainly much more important than “doing your job”.

Sorry cops. The system is failing you, and you are failing you. It’s a shitty gig all around.