Bad cop, no donut!

When cops in Phoenix got an anonymous phone call that a guy was suicidal, they went and knocked on his door. When he didn't answer because he was wearing earplugs to sleep, they broke in through the garage, setting off a very loud alarm that woke him up, and then ran when he responded by running to his bedroom and grabbing a gun to deal with the unknown intruders. The Phoenix PD then proceeded to set up a seige of his house and threaten him with death for scaring their two cops. I guess if he'd really been suicidal, he would have stepped out the door with the rifle. Since he wasn't suicidal and that's why they were at the house to begin with, to check whether he was suicidal, the cops should have simply left -- but instead, the guy has been in jail since August for, err, not being suicidal.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia a guy was sleeping on his couch when two cops broke in his front door. While he was still sleeping, they tasered him, then when that woke him up, he produced his ID showing that he lived there, and the cops tasered him again. Apparently forgetting to turn off your silent alarm is a crime punishable via cattle-prodding in Philadelphia...

We have the funniest little police state here in the United States. It's what I call the "soft" police state, where we have the largest number of police offers per capita of any nation on the planet and more prisoners per capita than any other nation on the planet, yet, because in general police are only harrassing "those" people for "driving while brown", the majority of Americans don't see the sort of pervasive and oppressive police presence that is usually associated with the words "police state"...

-- Badtux the Observant Penguin