There are many perceptive comments in this thread. There is no question that being a cop is a tough job in the best of times. As we (U.S.) have moved from essentially a common law country to one governed by statutory law, the task of enforcers of all kinds became increasingly difficult for a complex of reasons - mostly because there are simply too many statutes to enforce. The proliferation of statutes is itself reflective of a problem in a statutory vs a common law scheme of things - any group can organize a legislative campaign to get their particular view of goodness and rightousness encoded in the statutes and, by definition, applicable to people who may or may not share that view. That equates to a continuously diminishing degree of consensus among the governed, and a continuously increasing constraint on individual options - ie, a loss of freedoms. The judicial system has responded to this encroachment on freedoms by creating evermore procedural standards governing aspects of enforcement. Those procedural restrictions on the enforcers create much frustration, and often invite egregious evasion or avoidance strategies. Taken all together, these realitise create a condition in which citizens sense a diminishment of certainties, though just what those certainties are depends greatly on whose perceptions are considered. The critical point occurs when "enough" people perceive a sufficient lack of "certainty" to motivate them to prefer a "strong law and order" canditate for anything from dog-catcher to president. At that point, in come the blue-shirts, and the cycle begins again in an ever deepening spiral of the decay of independence. Ever so gradually, the "law" changes form a system for "organizing" a society to a system of "oppressing" a people. These are no great, new insights. You can find all of them in the history of the Anmerican revolution, and probably in revolutionary movements in most other cultures and countries. Where does it all end, and can we collectively muster the courage and wisdom to reverse the process? Well, the end, I think, is a devolution, with or without a revolution, where social control (i.e.; "law") reverts to some form of localized concensus system.

Didn't intend to get so carried away, but after a day in the library researching arcane issues in criminal law, it just sort of oozed out. Think I need to fix myself a bit o the crature.