When Cops Commit Crimes
“It’s not as rare as you might think. It happens at all stages of officers’ careers, and at all ranks,” Stinson said.
The data set includes 8,006 arrest incidents resulting in 13,623 charges involving 6,596 police officers from 2005 through 2012, with more years of data to come. Nearly half these incidents, Stinson and his research team concluded, were violent.
The data covers 2,830 state, local, and special law enforcement agencies across all 50 states plus Washington, D.C. That’s just a fraction of the approximately 18,000 law enforcement agencies and 1.1 million sworn officers in the U.S., so the data set is not comprehensive, but it’s the most extensive and ambitious look at cop crime to date...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/595kv3/police-crime-database
Excerpts from ‘IRONY’:
There are moments in life when we discover the fallacies in some prior teachings we have received. Such moments, tend to lay caution to youthful idealism and are replaced by new realities. These realities may rattle the foundations of our ideological and spiritual underpinning, but, they still enter our lives and minds without fail.
It becomes a defining moment which can leave us with a sickening feeling that descends to the pit of our stomach. It is a feeling that leaves a void of undefinable characteristics, an emptiness with which we are buffeted by – seemingly – ceaseless complexities in our analytical persuasions; then all that remains is a maddening state of utter confusion.
It is an experience that is sometimes difficult to replace with words; words that portray the consternation or anger which we may feel. Newness can sometimes be perplexing and the past events are not easily forgotten (or cannot be). Ideas that are already imbedded in us, almost from the moment since our awakening, are not easily removed, but must be accomplished. Though, it is not easy to walk away; putting distance between us and our affinity for these ideas, it must be done. We cannot keep staring into the void, thinking somehow we may find the answer. We must instead, let passion guide our footsteps and drive our search for knowledge. We must purge our thoughts of many things we were taught and thought we knew before.
We must not succumb to confusion in our life but seek to recognize that learning is an ongoing process fed by experiences that on occasion, are not pleasant.
To emerge from our aimless meanderings and find the sunlit meadows of new understandings, we must be ready to take risk and step out to change perceptions that have been disproven.
Such was my dilemma in my overall pursuit of a Christian experience and my desire to embrace our laws - without equivocation.
I have learned that despite the many contradictions that I have encountered, ultimately, I must seek to reflect upon my own experiences and to make sense of the unending flow of changing perspectives. Hopefully, somehow, someday, I will emerge with a better understanding of what will be required of me, to illuminate a brighter path forward to a more unified world of Homo sapiens.
Author, Joan Chittister, hints at this condition when she penned: “contemplation is a very dangerous activity. It not only brings us face to face with God. It brings us as well, face to face with the world, face to face with the self. And then of course, something must be done; she continues, “nothing stays the same once we have found the God within”, and she believes that “we carry the world in our hearts; the oppression of all peoples, the suffering of our friends, the burdens of our enemies, the raping of the earth, the hunger of the starving, the joy of every laughing child.”[1]…
https://www.amazon.com/IRONY-Theophilus-Nicholson/dp/1520964846