The Bookworm Beat 12/9/14 — Just a few quick links, and open thread

Another day, another trip to the doctor for my mother and, by extension, for me.  Here are just a few quick links before I go:

Cop cams are great if you don’t value your own privacy

The Brimfield Police Chief is at it again, dispensing common sense. This time, he’s talking about police cams, which he freely acknowledges would be a great thing for his department. With those cameras in place, many fallacious complaints would just vanish. He warns, though, that there’s a downside:

Now, for the bad part for citizens. Body cameras are an intrusion into your privacy, believe it or not. Local law enforcement will now become one more spoke in the big wheel of government, taping our interaction with all of YOU. When you call us to your home, we will arrive and hit “record.” The barking dog, neighbor dispute, burglary, identity theft, custody disputes and more will be recorded. When we come to your house for a domestic or a custody/divorce issue, what we record is all public record. Your neighbors, ex-spouses and even enemies can request a copy…and we must provide it. Shortly after that, it will arrive on You Tube. A couple of companies will form on the inter-web, consisting of nothing but body cam footage. It will be a constant, 24 hours per day, seven days per week episode of “Cops”…starring the ordinary American citizen. We get dozens of requests per year for written reports, usually in divorce or neighbor dispute cases. Those could now come with video. Yikes.

The above paragraph is not written to intimidate or scare anyone. It is my opinion of the likely course of this body camera push. In the past, some sensitive issues and locations (the American home) have not been fair game for video. Now, with these cameras in place, defense and civil attorneys will shred the police in court if we chose to not tape some segment of an interaction with the public. It will become a “standard.” We will tell them it is because of a victim, child or sensitive situation…and they will accuse us of turning the camera off and abusing authority. This will result in us taping everything, regardless of potential damage and embarrassment to the citizens we are sworn to protect.

Police under siege

At least one police officer, who finds himself policing in a world in which police are once again referred to as “pigs,” has formally announced that he’s fed up. The demands on police, he says, are ridiculous. And he’s right too. His point is that, as societal structures fall apart, the usual suspects are insisting that the police must hold them together . . . and they can’t.

The dirty secret about America’s black community

What police cannot say, and what those opposing the race riots are not supposed to say, is that black Americans’ problem is deeper than some bad policing here and there: The problem is that blacks have a violence and crime culture. This culture, which started at precisely the same time as LBJ’s “Great Society” welfare push, is enormously self-destructive, but honest dialog is disallowed. Until we talk about this problem, we’re at a societal stalemate that will periodically bubble over into violence.

Rape only matters when it’s politically expedient for the Left

This is an issue that crops up repeatedly, since I’m pretty darn sure I’ve typed a similar post headline to the one above, albeit some years ago. Not all rapes are created equal, and Glenn Reynolds delves into the rapes that count and those that don’t.

An IDF love story

They came together in a time of existential war, and they’re still together.