#myNYPD Backlash Spreads To Other Cities (PHOTOS)

I wonder if Bloomberg would fund a stop and frisk campaign to identify police brutality across the country. A sure way to Heaven and acceptance by the common people for a money loving GOP turned Indie.

I dunno…what have you been up to?

The human toll is huge. This campaign could also be expanded to include all the gentle and beloved household pets shot by cops because cops can shoot a dog or a cat and who’s to stop them?

There was a particularly heart-breaking case out of Texas just the other day–a sweet dog shot in the head because it barked as a cop approached its owners house to take a robbery report. A dog barked as a stranger approached, and that was provocation enough for this trigger-happy cop. “Sorry, I shot your dog,” said the cop, shrugging. The animal was left in agony, horribly and fatally wounded.

The slaughter of helpless pets is in fact a notorious police tactic, increasingly used in this country to intimidate and terrorize citizens, to “show them who’s boss.” Cops will often, quite casually, gun down household pets as a routine part of a raid or a legal search. After the fact, the animal is invariably represented as a dangerous and feral menace–even a five pound lap-dog is glibly translated into a deadly pit bull, and the sadistic cops who kill these creatures are almost never subject to any kind of sanction. Instead, the “thin blue line,” the police code of omerta, protects them from any sort of exposure or sanction.

Of course, if you’re not going to be sanctioned for gunning down a mentally ill kid or beating a frightened schizophrenic to death or blasting a student protestor in the face with toxic chemicals or riddling a delusional woman with bullets for speeding through the streets of Washington DC, you’re certainly not going to pay the price for killing an animal.

Just to put it all in perspective, in the US today, your odds of being killed by a cop are roughly eight times your odds of being killed by a terrorist. American cops kill between 500 and 600 civilians a year, torturing, intimidating and otherwise brutalizing untold numbers more. Even as policework becomes less and less dangerous for the cops themselves, it has become more and more dangerous for the rest of us. The price tag for lawsuits that must be settled each year by America’s cities–by America’s taxpayers–for police misconduct and brutality is in the hundreds of millions of dollars–and the cases that are brought to law only represent the tip of the iceberg.

Imagine the difference if that money were dedicated to screening out the sociopaths and sadists, and training these people to do their job right; to restore community policing and other proven tactics for peacekeeping. And imagine the Twitter campaign that might result if we could actually trust and respect the armed men and women who theoretically “keep the peace.”