Derec, your special pleading will get you nowhere here.
No special pleading here.
Police are not justified to be assholes, regardless of what the law says.
And nobody says they are "justified to be assholes". However, them stopping people they see violating a law doesn't make them assholes.
And if Jarhyn is saying something that is true to the ethics demanded by the shape of reality, then yes, cops should do as I say, not because I said it, but because what I said happens to be right and the law happens to be wrongly constructed or just plain wrong.
Why is walking in the middle of the road being illegal a "wrongly constructed" law exactly?
If there's in Iran were actually the results of a democratic process, but exactly what they are now, they would still be wrong. How they got there doesn't matter; their content matters. Uganda democratically passed a law to imprison gays. The U.S. had very similar laws until very recently. We had laws against interracial marriage, against being gay, against drinking alcohol. The police were not justified in enforcing those laws either; it was the ethical duty of any officer who figured out that the law was bad to refuse to enforce it, subvert it, or quit. It is the same here.
Even if we were to accept your premise that police officers have the duty to engage in a sort of extrajudicial review of every single law they are tasked with enforcing, how exactly are laws against pedestrians walking in the middle of the street in any way comparable to criminalization of homosexuality etc?
I think for example that laws against prostitution are ridiculous, logically inconsistent (you are criminalizing performing/buying something as a paid service that is legal if no money overtly changes hands) and antithetical to a free society. Thus they should be repealed. But I am not calling police officers enforcing them "bullies", "assholes" etc.
Your argument from incredulity that an officer 'upholding the law' cannot possibly be harassment is facile.
Except I am not making such an argument. I am saying that an officer upholding in the law cannot automatically be harassment. A police officer can engage in harassing or otherwise unprofessional behavior during an otherwise legitimate stop. That doesn't make the stop itself unjustified.
If a cop stops somebody for a moving offense he can do things like accepting a bribe in order to not write the ticket. Him accepting a bribe doesn't mean that the stop itself was unjustified or that laws against moving offenses should be repealed.
it's exactly the sort of justification used to persecute Turing: it was upholding the law, legally digging into turing's life and legally incarcerating him. We lost one of the greatest minds to have ever lived because some FUCK police officer decided to uphold a shitty law.
No, it's because some FUCK politicians decided to pass a shitty law. I still do not see how laws against homosexuality compare to laws saying that pedestrians should use the sidewalk rather than walk in the middle of the roadway.
No. The law is not justification. The law exists to serve us. We made it up and we can damn we'll ignore it when it isn't doing it's job.
No, you can't just ignore the law and expect not to be stopped by the police. And the law exists to serve us all (including motorists), not just 18 year old delinquents that think they have the right to walk down the middle of the road and get enraged if a cop tells them to use the sidewalk. What if I decided that the law against not obeying traffic control devices no longer serves me and decide to ignore it?
Just like we ignore grammar when it fails to make us communicate good well, or when we ignore things like the economy or money when it doesn't allow us to equitably Ddistribute resources based on contributions.
FIFY.
Sometimes it's not the people doing the things that needs to change, sometimes it's the rules that need to change, even when those changes do not directly benefit you or I, but have a positive effect from change overall.
I do not see how anyone could benefit from allowing pedestrians from walking in the middle of the street. But even if it were a bad law that needed repealing it's not the job of the police officer to enforce only laws Jarhyn approves of. He is not an asshole or a bully just because he stops somebody who is engaging in violating a law Jarhyn thinks should be repealed.
Do you honestly think I believe for one second that you are utterly incapable of thinking of a single law that doesn't deserve enforcement?
Except that I have said the opposite from the beginning. However, I am not narcisistic enough to think that any police officer that enforces laws I do not like is automatically an "asshole" and a "bully" that engages in "harassment" and "abuse".
Do you honestly think I believe for one second that you honestly think there are no situations where the enforcement of an otherwise ok law is used to attack someone in an unjustified way?
Except I never said that a situation like that is not possible.
I clearly continue to think that the stop was an unjustified attempt at bullying poor people because they have little recourse.
These "poor people" have the "recourse" of walking on the sidewalk rather than forcing their (financially similarly situated) neighbors to dodge them in their cars.
It backfired and the situation spun out of control. I think that it should inform us on how the system needs to change.
It only backfired because the jaywalker was also a robber who panicked and attacked the cop. That is not the fault of jaywalking laws.
If a police officer stops a car for a minor moving violation and the driver turns out to be a wanted criminal driving a stolen car and a shootout ensues, does that mean that the "system needs to change" in the direction of no longer stopping drivers for minor moving violations?
