[Mad Dawg]

I'm not clear whether you are agreeing with me or disagreeing with me -- or whether your remark has anything to do with what I was saying.

At least part of what I was suggesting was that trying to blame this travesty on the police is an, um, injustice. Laws are not written by the police. Cases are not prosecuted by the police alone, there need to be prosecuting attorneys. Decisions are made by judges. But the person to whom I was responding was wanting to sue the police, and made no mention of the others involved in this disaster.

On a larger scale, what is your view about police and laws the individual officer considers unjust? If I am obliged to enforce a law that I disagree with, should I resign? Would justice or representative government be well served if the Law Enforcement Officers refused to enforce laws they disagreed with?

If justice is never served by injustices, then we will never have justice (until I am Tsar).

[coloradan]

On a larger scale, what is your view about police and laws the individual officer considers unjust? If I am obliged to enforce a law that I disagree with, should I resign? Would justice or representative government be well served if the Law Enforcement Officers refused to enforce laws they disagreed with?

There is no obligation for police officers to enforce any law. Otherwise, how do you have separation of powers? If the executives have to enforce every law, and the judiciary has to prosecute every arrestee, then the legislature has all the power, and the other two have little or none.

As it is, the practice of "officer's discretion" and for that matter "prosecutorial discretion" are well known, meaning they can decline to arrest or prosecute, respectively, although these practices are frequently used to let other government agents off the hook, when a private citizen would feel the full force of law under the same circumstances.

[WindOracle]

Then where is the justice in THIS scenario, which happened to a close friend of mine who is now sitting in Jefferson City Missouri in prison.

A couple years ago he dated this girl. She kept pressuring him about getting married, which he was not REALLY anxious to do quickly as he had just gotten a divorce 6 months earlier. She gets mad one day, and goes to the police department claiming he raped her. They arrest him, and three days later she comes sobbing into the sheriffs office admitting she lied and that he never raped her, and why she had told them what she did.

Ya think they dropped the charges? What they DID was tell her "You can change your story now if you want to, but be aware that charges of filing a false report will be leveled at you". Well, as I said, he is sitting in Jeff City now, so you know the outcome of that choice.

The only PHYSICAL evidence of any altercation was a bruised wrist she had from a fight that witnesses saw her get into at a local bar two nites before she made her report.