Walking Into a Real Hornet’s Nest

So a big story this week comes out of Waukesha, Wisconsin, where a study has been done concluding that sledding is dangerous. Waukesha Children’s Hospital brought in a police officer to clock the speed of sledders with radar, and discovered that sledders indeed go at an appreciable rate of speed – up to 19mph in some cases. The next step is of course the “you should wear a helmet” vigilante-ism.

Also not surprising about this story are some of the reactions from the public against the police officer in the article, Officer Jake Trussoni, as seen in some of the comments on Don Surber’s blog. It’s the standard party line: he should be out catching criminals, not oppressing the innocent citizen-sledders. In my opinion these people have completely missed the point of the article and the message it sends. It seems rather ridiculous to me to jump down the officer’s throat, when he was no doubt assigned to be there by his superiors in the name of “Community-Oriented Policing”.

People shouldn’t be so quick to jump all over the police officer. Jump all over the Children’s Hospital, or jump all over whoever was too lazy to buy their own radar equipment. But give some credit to a police department that doesn’t mind assigning expensive and much-needed resources to a community project.

Fuzzy Logic

I have many different circles of friends, one of which I lovingly refer to as the “skids”. These are mostly kids that have either abandoned or been abandoned by their families in their late teens, and find themselves frittering away their college years on drugs, booze, sex, and metal. Skids aren’t hardened criminals, by and large; in general they stick to engaging in vice-related minor crime. My relations with the group have cooled noticeably since I announced my L.E. aspirations, and the conversations are always entertaining.

Skids doing their thing.

A typical one starts out with, “You’re going to be a cop?! Duuuuude, I hate cops!”. Being the understanding type, I calmly ask them what makes them feel the way they do. What normally happens at this juncture is I listen for the next 20 minutes while the individual rattles off a long litany of DUI stops, busted hotbox parties, MIPs, and bogus “police brutality” stories involving their ex-ex-ex-boyfriend that tried to run. At the end they put all the blame for these negative experiences squarely on the shoulders of the police officers doing their job.

The fuzzy logic, which I point out to them as often as I can, is that they are abdicating responsibility for their own actions by blaming police officers for problems they are creating for themselves. If they didn’t drink or drive, or possess and consume controlled substances, or drink underage, or try to run from the police, things like the above rarely happen. Oddly enough, even the most anti-intellectual skid will often agree with this assessment.

The problem here is that skids actually hate the law, not cops. The law-hating behavior began when they were children and weren’t taught to respect their parents’ rules, and manifested itself later on as not having any respect whatsoever for society’s rules. They definitely don’t know what to do with me, because in general I’m rather friendly and can make anybody feel comfortable. Cops aren’t like that in their world of petty misdemeanors.

“I guess that means you’re straight-edge, huh?” – Skid
“I’m so beyond straight-edge it’d make your head hurt.” – Me