Allow me to preface this post by saying I have no problem with most of law enforcement but in every job where you have a good amount of power, some are bound to abuse it. Such was the case in Austin, Texas. They installed cameras on a small number of the stop lights around the city early last year. The idea behind this was to catch people who ran red lights by taking a picture of their license plates so that a ticket could be mailed to them. This turned out to work very well but it also ended up catching something rather unexpected. Between May of 2008 and April 13th of this year the hidden cameras at just those few stop lights caught police officers 39 times, running red lights. They were NOT responding to an emergency and had NO reason to be doing that when they did it. Some even flipped on their lights for a second to change the light to green after they had started going through the intersection and then shut them off a few moments later.

This is not a horrible abuse of power no, but if any of us were to do that we would be guaranteed to get a ticket or at least be held responsible in some way. Not these cops. The Police Chief of Austin is on record as saying that the officers involved have not been ticketed nor will they be. Seems moronic to me but oh well. I’m sure we’ve all seen a cop do something questionable while driving. Who’s gonna pull over a cop right? I guess the people of Austin if so inclined should perhaps use the media or speak to someone in Austin city government to see if theres something that can be done about it.

You think the craziness ends there? Nope. This story is a little shorter and a lot different as it involves correctional workers and not actual police officers. This one takes place at the Franklin Correctional Facility in Florida during a “Take your son or daughter to work day”. A corrections officer named Walter Schmidt decided to use all 50,000 volts of his stun gun on a few of the children, apparently with the parents permission… What is wrong with this guy? I remember one time I was being stupid as a kid and ended up getting shocked by the house current and it hurt really really bad! What would make him think that even with parent permission that something like this was an ok thing to do? It boggles the mind. Thankfully this guy was fired pending an investigation. It’s things like this that make me lose faith in humanity!