A couple of elections ago our community had the opportunity to initiate a citizen's police review board. The police union remained silent on the issue, such that there was virtually no opposition to the initiative. It still lost. Apparently enough voters noticed the people who screamed the loudest for a police review board were the same folks who planned the riots. In some communities a citizen's review board might be able to fairly evaluate police actions. The danger is that people who toss around terms like "police state," who are utterly incapable of impartiality with respect to law enforcement, invariably position themselves to get on a police review board so they can advance their agenda.

A well trained police officer will predicate every decision on how it will look to scores of folks who get to dissect the actions at their leisure. This includes police supervisors, district attorneys, defense attorneys, and judges. Everything a police officer does or doesn't do may eventually be scrutinized by a group of civilians. They're called juries. So every time a police officer does something, he or she has to consider criminal law, civil law, rules of evidence, constitutional rights, department policy, the safety of the participants, and most importantly, survival.

Once they take the action, they have to write a report, preserve the evidence, and try not to incur any overtime, often while being pressured to be available for the next significant call.

Now along comes the defense attorney, who gets to analyze the report and the evidence to figure out the most plausible lie to help the client get off with the minumum amount of punishment, and preserving the maximum amount of spoils. Any omission or mistake by the officer in the above described list of tasks can be magnified to great advantage. If a defense attorney can seed the jury with a few of the right people, a little suborned perjury here, a little race-baiting there, some well-placed exasperated sighs and condescending scowls, and voila! The police officer becomes the evil racist jack-booted thug, and the poor beleaguered client gets to be a victim of an oppressive system.

The magic of this scenario is that even if the jury doesn't buy it, and the miscreant gets that minuscule piece of what's coming to him, the defense attorney can still decry the injustice of it all, and bruit it about that the client was cheated. Some day all this wailing will come to fruition, and the defense attorney will get that juror on the panel who believes we live in a police state, and all the police just support the status quo no matter what, and all the police are racists, and the police are just an arm of the corporate robber-barons, keeping the poor in their place and blah blah blah.

Snot-nosed brat.