been convinced that there was any real connection between "bars" and actual signal strength. The entire time I've been using cell phones I've observed many places where I have 5 bars but cant get a call to connect or 1 bar and get more clarity than almost anywhere else. I do live in a mountainous, rural area but I have serious doubts that bars mean anything at all. I love the ad campaign "more bars in more places" WTF?! you can make more bars in more places by changing the phone programming. I'm gonna start a phone company and just program all the phones to always show 20 bars.

Yeah the cop being patient has everything to do with him being asian and absolutely nothing to do with the video camera in his face and his government trying to look friendly to the outside world.

Maybe the sinners are not the politicians or the people who vote for them, but the people who KNOW BETTER and don't work up the nerve to become politicians. Can you really blame the voting public for making a bad choice when the only choices available to them are bad choices? So maybe it's us (yeah let's just try this crazy thing by not blaming everyone else), the people sitting here on our high horses espousing all of the solutions to world problems and doing nothing of consequence with them, who are the sinners. I'm just sayin'.

Now I feel guilty. Damn

If you really believe that's how cops work then I have pity for you. I would never want to live in a country if I thought the police were that corrupt. Sounds too much like mexico to me. The truth is, police officers have to document all of their actions, and legally justify them. Especially here in Arizona. We are in the ninth circuit and have much more stringent rules and laws governing police behavior than most areas. If police don't have any legitimate search or seizure theory to support their actions, any evidence gained as a result of it is excluded from any court proceeding. And due to the fact that it will very likely lead to discipline of the officer at the least and in extreme cases can lead to the officer being personally liable or even criminally charged for violations of search and seizure law, officers are extremely good at self correcting and keeping their co-workers out of trouble. Police aren't quite as evil as you seem to think. Most of them actually seem to enjoy helping people, it's just that since the job of arresting people also falls to them, not quite as many people love them as do firefighters.

a "lawful encounter" is hardly ambiguous. It may be to you, but that's only because you haven't done any research on it. The idea of a "lawful" encounter and the scope of all different types of encounters is the subject of the single largest block of training in most police academies, "Search and Seizure". Seizure of persons, or "lawful encounters" is the most important concept in that training. Police spend conservatively 75% of their total continuing education time on search and seizure updates. These issues are litigated in nearly every case that goes before a jury and the case law involved is monumental. Yes, GP is right, police have to have a reason to stop someone, they can ask in such a way that any reasonable person would feel free to leave, to talk to you without other reason. But to require you to identify yourself or produce any kind of documentation, an officer must have a reasonable suspicion that you are committing or have committed a crime. That is precisely what "Lawful Encounter" means. If you regularly have "lawful encounters" with cops, you either spend a lot of time hanging around with them or are always around when crimes are being committed.

Tasers leave VERY visible traces. Most of the time it's the metal probes sticking out of you and the burn marks around them... It really easy to see that someone's been hit with a taser. It's been over a year for me and I still have the marks from when I became certified in taser use.

He was the supervisor. Being a director there, he really would have very little direct supervision, if any, more like a board meeting once a week or month

That's what my dad used to call smoking. "They say they'll kill you on the package..."

It's If...Then not If...Than. *IF you don't know that *THEN you shut the fuck up and get off of this site

I happen to work in law enforcement. That's what I mean by firsthand knowledge.

The problem is that the evidence for these claims is part of an investigation that I became involved in (on the police side to clarify) and as such is not releasable by myself. Though some hardcore research and public records requests in your own area will probably yield the same information. The way the particular case I'm talking about started was a wife coming in with a CD saying "there are pictures on here that are of children doing explicit things, this belongs to my husband and I'm concerned about my own children." or something to that effect. Which led to the seizure of his equipment and discovery of very very distasteful information.

The police. It seems relatively obvious that it was the municipal IT department or the software company that wrote the dispatch system, which is at fault here. But let's all jump on the Police officers' cause that's who gets blamed for everything. Damn Cops! Let's not consider that they probably were dispatched to the address and had no choice but to go. If police officers could just not go to a dispatched call because they thought it might be erroneous based on the address and there was a real emergency there then they would have criminal culpability.

Problem is that most issues of this nature just beg to escalate. Today's "oops" is tomorrow's "well I'll just look at it one more time" and in 20 years or so it's "Why not take pictures of my kids masturbating?" Some people are just not wired right and deviant behaviors escalate over time. Based on firsthand knowledge I can say that it is very likely that someone stumbling across a few CP photos on a computer could easily lead to that computer being found to contain evidence of the owner producing CP.

How to get modded up: Using "Americans" in a way that suggests you are not one and much smarter than all who are. "Americans must always sue everyone..."? I mean seriously if that's the kind of horrid generalization that passes for "insightful" around here...
Seems like Europeans must always start world wars and wait until us stupid Americans come and fix it for them.
Seems like Asians must always force everyone to work in sweat shops.
Seems like Australians must always talk about putting shrimp on the barbie.
etc...

except for the whole

Thing,
If you have a PDA/phone that can access a fat32 usb drive then please let me know, cause that would be awesome.