NYPD Imitates IMPD...

Also known as "cops behaving badly"...

5 NYPD employees arrested in separate incidents, charges include driving while intoxicated

NEW YORK – Five New York Police Department employees, including three police officers, have been arrested in separate incidents on charges including driving while intoxicated and unlawful surveillance.

Off-duty police officers Joseph King and Dennis Munge were each charged with driving while intoxicated on Sunday in Queens. King was also charged with leaving the scene of an accident and refusing to take a breathalyzer test.

Now, I know, you take any group of people, be it cops, air traffic controllers, or even sales weasels, and you're going to run across a few bad apples. It would be more shocking if there weren't people who acted like, well, humans in every walk of life. When it's NYPD, though, there's an extra helping of schadenfreude - these are, after all, the superhuman uber beings who are allowed to possess assault rifles - I'm sorry, that's patrol rifles - as well as standard capacity magazines - unlike the rest of the peons in New York. They're held to a higher standard when it comes to being able to possess firearms - but, apparently, not when it comes to the keys to the car...

These types of stories are useful when the tired old "only the police should have guns" argument rears its head in the gun control debate. It's worth pointing out that police officers are regular human beings, just like the rest of us. They have bad days, they make bad decisions sometimes, they are no more or less human and fallible than the rest of us - so if the rest of us are too volatile to own or possess firearms, neither should the police officers who share our carbon footprint. If a Xerox repair technician cannot be trusted to own a firearm because they might have it lost/stolen/taken away, then neither should Officer Friendly. If the local cocktail waitress in that rough part of town can't walk to her car after work with her trust 9mm by her side because she might shoot the wrong person, well, why is her judgement any less valid than the trained officer? She knows the guy waving a knife at her telling her to get into his car isn't offering her a ride home...

Cops are people too. That's neither a blanket condemnation nor tacit approval of any behavior, just simple admission that they're subject to the same forces that guide the hands of the rest of us. They have bills to pay and deadlines to meet, they enjoy a cold one with friends, they make mistakes like we all do. Yet when it comes to possessing firearms, far too many argue that the simple act of being employed as a police officer makes one somehow more suitable to carry a firearm, as though the badge and the badge alone imbues special powers. This is hardly the case.

Police officers are no more or less capable than anyone else in society from bearing arms - they're just the only ones paid to do it.

That is all.

Another dispatch from...

(image courtesy of Robb Allen)