Calm down, police, you`re too aggressive

defaultuser
Tue, 12 Oct 1999 22:13:20 +0000
Uncategorized

We have a serious priority glitch within our system of law enforcement, and I refuse to so passively comply anymore. Take a look around. Notice all the orange tickets blowing in the air; notice the plethora of squad cars idling in parking lots and how pleasantly well our law enforcers seem to cohere. They must, I’ve been convinced, have been forced to take Peers and Communication 101 during the course of training. If I hadn’t taken textual government in high school I could surely have summarized the primary function of law enforcement is to neglect necessity and necessitate insignificance. Due to lacking example, I would like to clear up ambiguity surrounding the rudimentary function of law. Law is not to a) place parking tickets under windshield wipers, b) prowl mundane house parties for “kids with cups,” and c) dress-up as a “metal-head” junky and scrape for petty offense. (At parties take notice of grungy individual bearing no cup in hand and wearing a severely out-dated checkered flannel shirt.) Law enforcement is supposedly present to provide security and administer order within a society. There is enough mugging, robbery, molestation, domestic war, child abuse and rape, (I could fill up this entire issue) to occupy our officers with problematic substance instead of trivial excuses for collections of the municipal. In one particular instance a set of under cover officers staked themselves in the parking lot of Kroger`s on 5th and High Street. They spotted a young adult couple walking into the store to buy alcohol and quietly followed observing the entire purchase. Once the couple made their way back to the car they were arrested, simply because one of the individuals, of which had no active participation, was 19 years of age. Let’s pause for a moment of logical discrepancy here. What do you consider to be of more detriment, the couple buying beer to take home or those intoxicated upon the town? Within the hour it took the officers to arrest the couple one can only estimate how many crimes of significantly higher severity were being committed and left to no retribution.We pay the men and women of law to protect us, not to endanger us more by wasting time on lesser offenses, while in the background real ones take place. I hate to say it, but squad cars in convenient store parking lots and officers distributing violations of street cleaning codes have no hope of lowering rape and assault percentages. We need progressive and aggressive police action, not indolent men and women posing in uniform. I’ve seen a lot of uniforms and I’ve seen a lot of crime. How come I rarely ever see those two together?
Lisa Bhungalia is a senior English major from Springboro, Oh. She asserts that we put law enforcement under as much scrutiny as it has put upon us.