How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

They say the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Well, that's wrong. For evil to triumph, all the good men must be gone, because a good man won't do nothing when faced with evil.

Whenever a bad cop does a bad thing, and no one steps in to stop it, there are no good cops left. Whenever the thin blue line is deployed to protect one of their own, it damns the entire company. Qui custodiet custodes, indeed. Andy Griffith retired long ago, and Barney Fife rose to power. Now there's no one responsible left to tell him when he can and cannot put his bullet in.

The system doesn't work at all. Police are NEVER held accountable, even when they blatantly needlessly kill citizens.

If anything, they get to take paid time off until they are cleared of wrongdoing.

There are no citizen review boards with teeth. There is no way that police departments can self-regulate.

I disagree entirely. The presence of the current crop of cops is what makes things "worse for everyone, in every way".

Police have a responsibility to the people they protect. Right now in the US, cops act like the public are there simply to be subjugated, and regularly and routinely shirk that responsibility inherent in the task of policing.

The whole reason we as a society give cops the monopoly on violence is because they're supposed to operate at a higher standard. Police in the US don't do that, as is evidenced by the police force in any major US city.

It's time for a system reboot.

Just taking stuff from the wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand )...

Emphasis where it appears is mine.

> In 1943, during the Second World War, HM Fort Roughs [Sealand] was constructed by the United Kingdom as one of the Maunsell Forts, primarily for defence against German mine-laying aircraft

> On 2 September 1967, the fort was occupied by Major Paddy Roy Bates, a British subject and pirate radio broadcaster, who ejected a competing group of pirate broadcasters.

> In 1968, British workmen entered what Bates claimed to be his territorial waters in order to service a navigational buoy near the platform. Michael Bates (son of Paddy Roy Bates) tried to scare the workmen off by firing warning shots from the former fort.

> In August 1978, while Bates and his wife were in England, Alexander Achenbach, who describes himself as the Prime Minister of Sealand, hired several German and Dutch mercenaries to spearhead an attack of Roughs Tower. They stormed the tower with speedboats, jet skis and helicopters, and took Bates' son hostage. Bates was able to retake the tower and capture Achenbach and the mercenaries.

And of course...

> While it has been described as the world's smallest country, the world's smallest nation, or a micronation, Sealand is not currently officially recognised by any established sovereign state, although Sealand's government claims it has been de facto recognised by the United Kingdom (after an English court ruled it did not have jurisdiction over Sealand as territorial water limitations were defined at the time) and Germany

Both of those claimed recognitions took place after an act of agression toward British / German citizens mentioned in the above excerpts.

So you've got a platform in the ocean that was created as part of a war effort, that has been the subject of a failed and a successful military coup, whose only unofficial recognition by established states came after assaulting their citizens, and that is still not officially recognized by any other state. (And which is currently sitting in British territorial waters, after they unilaterally annexed its surrounding ocean.) And all this is for a "state" with a population estimated at "over 50".

My bad, there was an explanation of the way the law worked in this case and for some reason I thought it was in our thread (and I was talking under the assumption that you had seen it too).

> He should be allowed to voice his protests and discuss the matter without being hailed to jail

"while according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, you are not legally required to carry ID, they say "Lastly, an officer cannot write you a summons if you do not provide i.d; instead he must arrest you. That means that if you are stopped for a violation such as loitering and do not provide i.d., you will be arrested"

He wasn't arrested as punishment, but as policy (they can't just write you a ticket if there's no way to identify you on a bike). There are cases of polices taking people at their word that they give the correct name, but for obvious reasons that's a courtesy. This re-casts the story from "police spitefully violate the law in response to shit-talking" to "police (spitefully) refuse to extend voluntary courtesy and instead go by the book, in response to shit-talking".

Now obviously the way he was treated _after_ arrest was an abuse of the system, and there are no arguments here about that. But 'debt' is correct in that you shouldn't expect to be rude to someone and then turn around and demand that they violate by-the-book law to do you a favor.

As far as the rest of your comment, I really feel pretty much the exact same way; I just don't think it contradicts the advice given by 'debt'.