" 'I kissed her breasts and nipples, as there was no place for my face to go,' the undercover detective wrote in his report of a 2011 vice sting." And this is not coming out of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Miami. And the next paragraph from the news article in the Salt Lake Tribune today quoting from a report about Vice Squad activities prepared by a Civilian Review Board also contains the sentence that "The review board also said the hands of some Salt Lake City police officers went places they shouldn't."
And specifically, again drawing from the Board Report and the newspaper article covering it, the detective grabbing the vagina of a masseuse was in bounds, but the boob kisser was on the wrong side of the line.
So who really gives a rats ass?
See, I'm really still just trying to become at peace with a news radio thing today about Matthew David Stewart, local boy with a big piece of his guts blown out when he seemingly shot the shit out of nearly an entire police strike force serving a search warrant on his house looking for a little pot grow he allegedly had going on there. And, yeah, it eventually was reported that his small basement did have some plants and lights and grow stuff. And what has never been reported in the intervening months is who shot who, actually, and how the whole thing became such a clusterfuck in the first place.
But, anyway, the voice of his sister was on the radio a few hours ago saying that even cop killers can be great brothers, and even cop killer familes can grieve for killed cops. And, of course, the part about the public still doesn't really know the truth.
And then the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial from today writes about a guy from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition who is in town doing his level best to talk sanity, and who the paper sort of says sort of has a point. So, anyway, my paper says "Alcohol and tobacco, of course, create a long list of serious social and health problems. But heavily armed drug lords and the destruction of civil society in parts of Mexico, clogged courts and prisons in the United States and street violence of the kind that claimed the life of an Ogden police officer a few months ago are not among them." With the phrase "street violence" here meaning the senseless shootout in the tiny home of Matthew David Stewart.
I guess if the difference between police grabbing crotches and police licking nipples can be a matter of context, even the phrase "street violence" can appropriatly become fair game. But, personally, I go far enough back in this shit that I just plain don't want to see sex workers performing on cops, and I sure as hell don't feel like paying cops to get their jollies off on the payroll. Period.
And, similarly, no one will ever convince me that street violence originates inside the home of an otherwise peaceful person. I'm just never going to go there. This entire fucking Drug War is just way fucked up. And if the only way we can try to justify doing anything less than totally scrapping it is to say that it's okay to have the police violently assault the homes of pot growers because sometimes we just have to do that, then that's no different from saying that we've become a society that just no longer has the ability to draw lines appropriately.