Was he convicted on all counts?

Sounds like the usual drummed up charges.

Dare disagree with a denial of your right? That's disorderly conduct.

Refuse to consent to search? More of the same.

Resisting? That's almost a throw-away charge these days. No witnesses, just the word of the cop against the word of a average Joe. Average Joe loses every time.

Cops lie. Cops overcharge. Whether it's 1-percent of the force or 90-percent, the advice is the same: never trust the police unless it you who has engaged them. In a world were risk = probability of an event occuring multiplied by the harm caused should that event occur, you can never be too cautious when dealing with LEO. Moreso when dealing with under-trained, over-authorized LEO wannabes.

If these words offend any legitimate officers, I'm sorry. If you want to change this relationship, start taking a zero-tolerance approach to your brethern. Don't turn the other way when they lie about traffic tickets, DUI, resisting, disorderly, assualt, etc. Even the simplist lie about the most minor crime reinforces the above to the detriment of your credibility.

So a known druggie (with a huge criminal history) gets caught attempting to come through security with a large amount of cash, takes off running out of the checkpoint, knocking over anything that stands in his way (including people) and he is the "victim" in this case?

Drummed up charges? Some of the folks on this forum absolutely amaze me. The only time I hear such statements as yours are those I'm usually taking to jail, knowing they are guilty and refusing to take any responsibility for their actions. We are the bad guys and just pick on everyone because of a big head behind a badge...sigh. As far as the "resisting," it was not physically resisting arrest, but refusing to stop when told to by law enforcement. Had it been your mom, dad, brother, sister nailed by this guy on the way out of the airport, I'm sure you would have been complaining one way or the other that we did not do enough.

On a side note, as a DUI Instructor and one that often teaches at the state academy in the subject, please tell me how (or even why) police would lie about a DUI charge? Not to get side-tracked on the topic at hand, but considering that alcohol accounts for 40% of all fatal crashes in this country, I'm assuming that you also think that DUI arrests are a sham as well. Absolutely ridiculous.

I can tell you feel you have someway been wronged by police in your lifetime, and whether it is true or not, it is sad that you make such generalized baseless statements about law enforcement on open forums. People who go through life with such hate and resentment towards what I consider still a noble profession (in my opinion) based on an isolated incident seem to live that way and grow old hateful and alone. I'm not denying there are bad apples in the bunch, but it is the same just as with any other profession. Are you the one that points to an officer with your child and says "he will take you to jail," or do you tell them "they are here to help."

Yes he was, and I know the next question that is coming. I will try to dig up his name and copy the link to the criminal court clerk website. ;)

The only thing ridiculous is your abysmal reading comprehension.

My comments were directed to the quote:

If a person is a drug dealer, arrest him on drug charges. You gain no points from the general public for arresting someone just because you "know" he is "guilty of something, if not now then in the past."

My comments stand on their merits: disorderly conduct and resisting arrest are too often throw-away charges used by police to quiet dissent. Quite often those charges are dismissed before trial. They are made, however, both in spirit and often with actual articulation by the officer "you may be right, but I'm the one going home tonight." I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you've never used that phrase, but I challenge you to deny you haven't heard it or a variation thereof.

DUI's are routinely falsified. For you to come here and deny such reveals you are either untrustworthy, or you do not hold the position and experience you claim. Here is but one of many stories of how to lie when effectuating a DUI arrest.

Listen, and listen well, most everyone knows, either by first hand experience or by the trusted experience of a loved one, of a cop who has lied. Most often the lie is about something simple: whether the officer actually saw a moving violation (or just inferred it) or what was said between two parties, or whether the cop was abusive, aggressive or threatening. And in those experiences are formed the public awareness that if a cop will lie in court about something so trivial, you can be assured he will lie about something larger and more important.

If you want to break this perception, start policing your colleagues. Until then, you have no one but yourself to blame. Alternatively, you can lie to yourself and to others about the integrity of the police. Your choice, I suppose. For the rare few who haven't had such experiences with the police, take your local prosecutor or public defender to lunch, go off the record, hear the horror stories they have to tell about the local constabulary.

Finally, I note with disgust your wholly pathetic use of disingenuous argument. Comparing me to an arrestee, as to stain me with his crime? Accusing me, with absolutely no basis what so ever, of being opposed to DUI enforcement? Is that the best you can do? Are you so limited in the ability to think and respond critically that you must resort to such cheap rhetoric?

JMR:
You say dui's are routinely falsified. Prove that. I never falsified one when I was an leo & I know of no leo who has.

I didn't make the original claim on this thread but you might want to check out this or this. You may want to look here as well. And don't miss this one.

I'm not sure what the threshold is to establish "routinely falsified" as an accurate description but I would suspect that these articles would be a good start towards meeting it.

coachrowsey, thanks for your service, and I trust you were part of the vast majority that were good cops during your time.

Routinely may be the overstatement, let's fall back to common. I suspect that you have been out of enforcement for some time. Current MADD pressures have translated to quotas for cops and to falsehoods in their arrests.

The focus of my comments has two elements:

1) It is the risk of encountering a bad cop (even if it is one-percent chance) that means the average citizen needs to wary during each uninitiated contact with LEO.
2) The only way to turn this around is to have the police start policing themselves and to turn in fellow LEO who act in violation of law or policy.

Your evidence to support this statement is an article from Phoenix about a rogue overbearing Phoenix officer who does not have a clue about DUI arrests? Sorry, don't buy that one. It seems this story is also written by someone looking to burn the department anyway. Making remarks regarding the "tax dollars" about five officers on scene. Not to dispel what occurred on scene that night, but what I have learned on these forums, especially the police forums, there are always two sides to every story, and most of the time the one side comes from the arrested party, and not the officer that did the arresting.

You mean we gain no points from you. In my opinion, your opinion does not count for the "public at large." It doesn't seem like a "stretch" to me to charge someone with disorderly & resist stop/frisk/halt when you are running through an airport, knocking people over, while being yelled to stop by police officers after making an attempt to go through security. A "stretch" would be hitting him with assault and/or evading, which neither happened, because my department does not work that way.

Read my above post. Maybe with the agency in your neck of the woods, but as I stated above, this upstanding individual easily met the criteria for these charges and then some. We did not look through the books to hit this guy with anything and everything possible, whether it would stick or not.

As a SGT, Instructor, and FTO, I DO police my colleagues. Obviously it is harder to do with larger agencies for IA and the like, but in my agency, the type officers you are referring to do not last long, if they get hired at all. As I have said once before, there are definitely bad apples among us, but you seem to imply that they account for a much larger majority, which in my opinion, is BS.

I speak it as I see it. You support enforcement yet you claim that DUIs are routinely falsified?

Do you honestly know how many people are arrested for DUI who are actually impaired versus those that are not? Let me put it this way, as one who holds the most DUI arrests in my agency for the last couple of years and speaks often with the other DUI officers with the local metro agency. General Sessions court in Nashville, TN sets aside 1 day a week (in all court rooms) for DUI arrests, and there is not a week that goes by where there is standing room only. Every officer in the DUI unit for Metro Nashville PD easily makes in excess of 200 DUI arrests annually, and it doesn't seem that the numbers are getting any less. A number that is also increasing is the convictions, because training for LEOs in my state has become more stringent on every officer that attends the academy so that actual offenders do not walk on a technicality. I know because I help teach it. It is an uphill battle from the beginning, because you can guarantee at least a couple of jurors in a jury trial did some drinking and driving the week before. It is still not a big deal in most of our country, even with the staggering number of alcohol-related deaths. I know because I continue to see it.

From being in this line of work, those who seem to have the most disdain for law enforcement are the ones that have to deal with us on a common basis. Not to imply that you are a criminal, but I would assume that your issues with TSA would not slide so easily to include law enforcement unless you had a bad encounter with a police officer, whether it be an arrest or something as simple as an officer being rude/unprofessional to you or someone you are close to. I have yet to see a positive remark from you regarding any government agent on here in my short time. I admit I have not read many posts from here, but you seem to be the one here to quickly make snide comments and baseless assumptions about us. Honestly the post about coach is the first semi-positive one I've seen.

Not quite the same. Other professions can't arrest you, charge you, cause you physical or financial harm. Greater authority requires greater responsibility, and it's too often simply not there.

It only takes ONE bad encounter with a cop to sour an opinion for life. Such bad encounters are not limited to criminals either: see Youtube.

Bad Banker - You're bankrupt.
Bad Lawyer - You're in jail.
Bad Doctor - You're dead.

You can stop being the recipient of a banker's, lawyer's or doctor's services by not accepting the services. How do I do that for a police officer? The relationships (excepting some ER care) for other professions are initiated by the client.

BTW: Where shall I put your dead, sir?

Anyone can find stories of bad actions by bad LEOs, because good stories about the hundreds of thousands of legitimate arrests are not news worthy. A couple of bad officers in Chicago? How many does that agency have? excess of 30k.... As I mentioned to JMR, compare the bad apples to good in law enforcement and I'm sure it is less than 5%. That's still too many, but since the media's agenda is to simply "make the story," then all you will see is the bad apples. Not much I or my counterparts can do about that. We will never rid the law enforcement profession of bad officers, but I think most departments do what they can to make the number minimal.

I think you misunderstand what many people are concerned about. It's not the officers that do bad (like beat up someone after they're no longer a threat, etc.), it's the fact that nearly 100% of officers that witness such things do nothing.

How many officers commit crimes (acts that are blatantly criminal) while on duty with a partner every year? 100? 1000? How many are arrested by other officers, such as their partners, witnessing the crimes?

When one looks at it this way one does not see that there are a few bad apples, but rather that there are very few good apples.

More trivially, it's worth pondering the questions "How often do officers give their partners speeding tickets when in the same car?" (LEO passenger looks at police car's calibrated speedometer on the way to lunch) and "What would happen to an officer that issued such a ticket?".

I pretty much agree with you.
 

I don't really have a disagreement with anything you said. The first 10 years of my career I worked in a support role for law enforcement agencies - three state level and a few local PDs and sheriffs. I lived next door to police officers. I have a lot of respect for the vast majority of dedicated, conscientious, hard-working LEOs. However; I can also see that political pressure, from MADD and others, has put many law enforcement agencies into a difficult position. With federal funding contingent on having states deal "appropriately" with DUI it is understandable that pressure is put on LEOs to produce. We all know that when things reach the point where LEOs have a quota to fill (whether formal or "unwritten") some individuals will start to cut corners and make questionable arrests.

As I stated before, I don't know where the threshold for "routine" lies. I think that is something for which each person will have a different answer. However; from my perspective we've reached the point where questionable and bogus DUI arrests are becoming more and more common.