minneapolis

Okay, I just took a look at the videos of what happened to one Alex Pretti yesterday in Minneapolis.  Pretti being the latest person to perish in the chaos that’s happening there.

I won’t pretend to have all the evidence/facts of the case.  But what it seems to me, at this hour anyway, is that Pretti got himself involved in a bad situation and the Border Patrol direly over-reacted.  That over-reaction was exacerbated by the presence on Pretti of a loaded firearm.

I think there’re more than enough that went wrong in this incident to assign blame to practically everybody involved.  There are no clean hands or clean hearts in this matter.  No one can claim innocence.  This almost comes across as an event that was bound to occur and the buck happened to land on Alex Pretti.

As I’ve said on Facebook and elsewhere lately, too many times now, ...

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Let me preface this by stating from the start: I know fully well that bad cops exist.  There is a city in North Carolina that I am forever going to loathe going through because of one incident that involved both city police and county sheriff’s personnel, and that was almost twenty years ago (oh the perils of being a puppy-eyed cub reporter getting knocked around by the world for the first time).  I believe that there are few things as bad as any member of law enforcement who consciously betrays what it means to take an oath and puts on the badge.  And this blog has chronicled law enforcement abuse so many times that it’s gotten its own tag.

In short: I get it.

But I’m also grateful for being able to still appreciate that the good cops far outnumber the bad.
Three situations come to mind as I write
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