I remember having a conversation over beers with a detective back in my college days as he lamented the change in the way things were done. You see, it seems that when young punks like I was stepped out of line in the old days, they got whacked around pretty good by the cops and sent home with the bruises. Nowadays the cops would arrest them. Part of me likes the first way better (assuming real guilt, of course) -- no police record and all
sorry about the email program
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> 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
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