{"id":1547,"date":"2004-09-02T12:15:58","date_gmt":"2004-09-02T16:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/09\/02\/vengeful-mass-cop\/"},"modified":"2004-09-02T12:15:58","modified_gmt":"2004-09-02T16:15:58","slug":"vengeful-mass-cop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/09\/02\/vengeful-mass-cop\/","title":{"rendered":"Vengeful Mass cop"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

I ran into my friend Bart last night, and he told me about an
\naltercation he had with a Mass State cop on his way home last
\nnight.  It doesn’t surprise me, because with only a couple of
\nexceptions, I have found the police here in the Boston area to be
\nunhelpful, fairly rude, and capricious in their enforcement of the law.<\/p>\n

So Bart was driving home, smoking, and he dropped his cigarette out the
\nwindow (which I think he shouldn’t have done, but there you go). 
\nStatey pulls him over, tells him he shouldn’t have done that, and asks
\nfor his license.  Bart just bought his car about a week and a half
\nago, and previous to that, he had his Arizona driver’s license. 
\nThe clerk at the DMV told him he had 30 days to get his out-of-state
\nlicense converted to a Mass license.<\/p>\n

Statey asks why he has an Arizona license, and Bart responds that he
\nhad been told that DMV said he had 30 days, so he was in the process of
\nconverting it, but the thirty days had not yet expired.  Statey
\ntells him he’s wrong and that he was supposed to do it the moment he
\narrived in state.  Statey then asks Bart if he’s ever been
\narrested; Bart responds that he’s been arrested three times, in three
\nstates, for civil disobedience protesting.  Statey orders him out
\nof the car, calls a tow truck, and has the car towed to an impound
\nlot.  Ninety-five bucks to get it out, and ninety to convert the
\nlicense.  And the clerk at DMV tells him that Statey was wrong,
\nthat he truly did have 30 days to change the license over.  Bart
\nprobably got towed because he’d been arrested for protesting, not
\nbecause he dropped a cigarette from his car.  <\/p>\n

This is not the first time I have heard or experienced Mass cops do
\nsomething like this.  Cops here in the Boston area act like jerks much of the time — they swagger, seems to like
\nexerting power over people (Like Cartman on South Park: “Respect my
\nAU-THOR-I-TAY!”), and speak abusively and rudely to many of the people
\nwho address them.  Protecting and serving don’t seem to be on the agenda.<\/p>\n

And they’re got some temerity, too.  Recently, the Boston cops
\njust got a guaranteed 14.5 percent raise over the next three years, but
\nthey thought that still wasn’t enough, and they threatened to walk out
\nover it.  Who else is getting that much in guaranteed pay in this
\neconomy?  And then, they had the chutzpah to call our house and
\nask for donations to the Police Activities League, to support the
\npurchase of safety equipment for cops.  Use some of the raise, for
\nheaven’s sake!  Besides, the only reason people give the PAL money
\nis so that they can obtain a bumper sticker that indiactes they donated, and
\nthereby avoid the casual abuse of authority that Bart experienced.<\/p>\n

No, I’m not against cops.  But I’m against them abusing their
\nauthority in such blatant ways.  When they do this, they show
\nthemselves little better than the criminals out there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I ran into my friend Bart last night, and he told me about an altercation he had with a Mass State cop on his way home last night.  It doesn’t surprise me, because with only a couple of exceptions, I have found the police here in the Boston area to be unhelpful, fairly rude, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-day2day"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-oX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}