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*