NEWS: Citizen Tickets Cop, Doesn't End Up Ass-Kicked

Yeah, I'm not really getting the OP's point in putting this in Silliness. I mean, CE's already a wasteland of trolls, why bring that here?

It's true, faithful reader... I'm human after all. Typos and everything.

Wasn't my call, although, the story seems pretty silly to me.

I'm here to help.

I predict that newswire writers will very soon be rather adverse to posting their work on this board.

Parking his vehicle in front of the restaurant is part of being able to respond to an emergency. If the Officer had parked further away and needed to respond, and was hindered due to "parking," the response time would be longer than needed, and lives might have been placed in danger. If the Officer had taken a table and had eaten there, that would be a traffic violation. Also, the new lawyer, had no idea of the situation at hand. I just hope Bryant minds all of the laws all the time. I also hope he isn't in need of service any time soon.

well, seeing as i have been on a ride along with the portland police bureau, when officers go to get food or take a piss or anything like that, they are taken off of the response roster, and they can only take these types of breaks when there are other officers in the area ready to respond, should an emergency pop up.

I'm going to CE to post lolcats and declare that I would indeed cuddle/have sex with/make out with the poster before me.

The walls are coming down, bitches!

I haven't. Because it's illegal and also fucking annoying.

This is Portland, folks. I've hung out there quite a bit (moving there in July) and NOWHERE is parking all that bad. Certainly doesn't hold a candle to downtown Dallas, or Ft Worth even. Everyone can get their cars somewhere pretty close to where they want to be. Also, as awesome as Portland is, it is also infamous nationwide for its especially fascist redneck police force. This guy is just doing what he feels he has to do. I'm sure he knew what the consequences would be, and went ahead anyway.
Portland works so well as a city largely because the cops have the power and resources to do their jobs, at least more so than in most other cities of this size. That is exactly the reason why citizens there must do their jobs as well - if a police department as strong and in control as the one in Portland is allowed to be a bunch of dicks, they will do just that.
As far as I can understand, the police is a part of the executive branch of our government.
What have we learned in the last 7 or so years about giving our executive branch even one fucking inch of leeway?
[edited for crappy midnight spelling]

I've actually been in a similar situation as Mr. Bryant, though I chose not to pursue the charges against the officer as I do not know the actual laws pertaining to this.

I was pulling onto highway 26 at the North Plains exit, and all of a sudden a Oregon State Police officer goes speeding by me at 85mph with out lights or sirens on. It would've been real bad had I switched to the far lane. So being the concerned citizen that I am sped up and paced the police officer that was how I figured out the 85mph. After noticing the officers speed I started to flash my brights at the police officer, he pulled over just before the Shute Road exit. At this point i was quite surprised that the officer actually pulled over, and that I was reversing the typical role. I walked up to the officers car and he got out to find out what the deal was. I told him that he was in violation of posted speed limits while not in a state of emergency and that this was quite dangerous. His response was that his duties put him above the law in situations like this. I took down his plate # and badge number, but did not follow through on filing a complaint/ pressing charges. Reading this I should have, I would've made the news...

I wish I had that much free time on my hands.

For every conscientious, respectful officer of the law, there is a good half dozen asshole cops who abuse their position of authority to gain an advantage, skirt the "hassles" of modern society, or exert their control over the populace. Were it not for this, maybe people would be a tad more sympathetic to officers of the law.

well, uh.... bully for you.

i do think this really comes down to a case-by-case location-based scenario. in a large city, sometimes a quick stop with the hazards on is almost the only way you're going to be able to run in somewhere with any degree of ease...

I love how cops use irrelevant situations to try to justify their bullshit. A cop once compared my friends and I skating to drunk driving.

It always adds to my disillusion whenever I see otherwise considerate people parking illegally. I've accidentally done it and felt bad, although I must admit when I worked at a law firm in 1983 in Haddonfield NJ I often let my meter expire since they were 8 hour meters and between going into work and getting back to the car took a coujple minutes. Of course, DURING those couple minutes I sometimes got an 8 dollar ticket, which when not paid, resulted in officers at my door a couple weeks later with a bench warrant to arrest me and cost me 90 bucks bond.

And in Philly 2 yeasrs prior to that, I failed to notice a No Overnight Parking sign near wehre I parked and woke up to find my car missing. When I reported it stolen I learned it was across town in the impound lot. Acouple hundred dollars was a lot of dough to a 17 year old high school senior in 1982.

I learned from those experiences to only park legally. EVER. Obviously, ignorance is NOT bliss when it comes to The Law.

And parking laws are in place for a reason.

That's an interesting bit of information, and it certainly has changed my opinion on this particular case. If the officer would not have been on the response roster, then he had no legitimate reason to violate the parking statutes.

However, this policy is not the case everywhere. I'm friends with a few Baton Rouge police officers, and I know for a fact that they can get called away when on a meal break, or restroom break.

I don't know the ratio is that skewed, though you may live in an atypical area for police corruption and abuse. It's also part of human-nature that we remember and report the bad, and overlook the mundane and expected. Yeah, officers should be expected to follow those rules without being given a golden sticker every time, but just because a few cops abuse their position and you hear about those cases, it doesn't mean that all or even most cops do.

I'm in!

Flip that ratio the other way around and multiply the larger number by 10 and you might be on the right track. But the 90% good/normal ones don't make good media headlines, don't sell newspapers, and don't generate web traffic. The 10% shithead ones are much more interesting to read about.

I'll concede this to you and RudieCantFail, who made the same point. I believe it's also a matter of perception. Cops acting like dicks, abusing their authority not only shakes our faith in those allegedly sworn to protect us, but hampers the ability of actual duty-bound officers to do their job. It's not so much the quantity of the transgressors, but the magnitude of the transgressions that give me the sense of rampant police corruption.

Sensationalistic, opportunistic media doesn't help either.

Blah blah blah. This shit is too serious. LOLcats in CE it is.

Yes...but this isn't a case of cops running protection for drug dealers, or doing hits for the mob...or even running an illegal sports betting enterprise. This is a case of one cop parking illegally for a few minutes while he waits for his lunch.

If a minor parking violation shakes your faith in law enforcement...how strong was your faith to begin with?

I've been generalizing about officers abusing their privilege since post one in this thread. The original story was just an excuse for me to get on my soapbox about a related, but not quite identical, situation.

The fact that the worse such transgression I regularly witness in my neighbourhood is police blowing red lights because they can't be bothered to wait the 45 seconds for it to change is probably proof enough that I've got it pretty good.

EXactly. As citizens not affiliated with law enformcement, when are we going to interact with officers? When we need help and when we are 'in trouble.' The latter can be either a direct result of our indiscretions (i.e. we broke the law), a misunderstanding (wrong time & place, perhaps, or misinterpretation of observation on the officer(s)' part, or we are victims of Abuse of Power.

Which one will we be most likely to tell everyone we know about? And the least? Flip the order in which I listed them and it's likely the answer for most of us.

Years ago I attended a workshop for associates of a retail showroom by which I was emplayed, and one night they asked us (between 12 and 20 of us, I guess) to relate to the group an experience with a business. It could be good or bad - it wasn't specified. Out of all oif us, I was the only one to tell a positive story, and it may have been simply because it had just happened
earlier that week.

Their point in summation was explained as that if something good happens you'll tell a person or two, but if somehting bad happens you will bitch about it to everyone.

I think that same concept applies here. We are far more likely to be made aware of the bad stuff.

Which doesn't excuse a LEO's self-waiving of the Law.

The issue here, which has become more and more steeped in Ambiguity as I read more and more comments, is a combination of whether he was really off the call list or was on call and might need to leave swiftly, and, if the latter is the case, whether there was legal parking close enough to faclitate a quick departure.

*goes to CE to search for new LOlcats*