Resets the rules of engagement, doesn't it?
At a bare minimum, it tells people 2 things:
1) Never call the police; and
2) Never help the police. I can see a lot of people not remembering anything, not seeing anything and not hearing anything. These jerks want to treat everyone like a criminal, then they should expect people to take the hint after a while and begin to act like them.
As for changing the rules of engagement - yeah, that is what is happening slowly across the country. If we have no right to a presumption of innocence, no right to be secure in our houses and possessions, no right to expect that the police will search a home (even if illegally) without absolutely trashing it ON PURPOSE, and no right to avoid being tased, beaten or shot...well, then 2 can play at that game. One side is less organized, for now. But since the side violating all codes of decency and our Constitutional rights is far, far outnumbered, not much organization is required by the rest of us. Perhaps none at all, just sufficient incidents that take the life of uniformed thugs and/or their families, and they'll be made helpless.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
Alexander Solzhenitzyn
If the courts don't fix this, or if higher levels politicians don't fix this, then we are headed for a disaster like we haven't seen since the Civil War. Never have a majority distrusted the police - but we're getting there.
Solzhenitsyn had it right. Will the rest of us learn before it is too late?