eric dorkin wrote:
>
> whose job do you think it is and why do you think they
> do it better? Seems to me that a black man in better
> off getting beaten up by a cop for smoking dope than
> being brought in front of a judge.
>
> Cops may be pricks, but prosecuters, them's a bird of
> a different feather altogether.
Here's how it was explained to me (re Chicago anyhow) about 15 years ago. Periodically the cops would go on a sort of street sweep, picking up pretty every young black male in sight. They would be held in the county jail until the middle of the night, when they would be brought before a judge. (They would have had a taste of what six months in the county jail would be like.) Then they would be told: If you plead innocent, the bail will be such and such, and the trial date will be approximately so many months from now. (They usually, of course, could not make that bail.) But if you plead guilty, we'll give you a year's probation, and you can go home now. The next time they were picked up, they would be in violation of probation, and would go straight to prison. (I think I got this information from a pamphlet put out by a group of public defenders, but I can't give any assurance now of my source.)
I agree with you about prosecutors -- but the whole system depends on collusion of cops, prosecutors, and judges. And the cops are the cutting edge.
Perhaps one of the legitimate functions for which cops _could be_ most useful is in domestic violence cases. The morning Tribune had a story on two cops who took 16 minutes to respond to repeated 911 calls from a woman who had a protection order against her husband. When they got there she was dead.
It is not overwhelmingly obvious that cops don't generate as much crime as they prevent. I still like Johnny Cash very much on San Quentin.
Carrol