Modern American Police

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/feature ... an-police/

In the summer of 2006 a frail, troubled 18-year-old girl named Ashley MacDonald ran through a nearly empty Huntington Beach, California, city park in the early morning holding a small knife. An onlooker called the police and soon two large male officers showed up. They shot the girl to death with 18 bullets, claiming she had lunged toward them and put their lives in danger. It was just another day for law enforcement in suburban Orange County, where—despite low crime rates—police have become increasingly aggressive and militaristic.

The MacDonald killing sparked an unusual amount of public outrage. This shooting, in particular, was hard to grasp. An empty park and a tiny teenager hardly make for a life-threatening situation for the officers. Couldn’t they just have backed away and used nonlethal alternatives such as pepper spray? The police admitted that they were readying a beanbag gun in the parking lot when the officers claimed that “time ran out.”

Angry that anyone would question their “split-second decisions,” the law enforcement “community” said it was wrong to jump to conclusions before the details of the investigation were complete. The sheriff defended the police publicly before any investigation even started, so he apparently was jumping to conclusions, but never mind. The consensus: calm down and wait for the department to see what happened.

I called the Huntington Beach Police Department (HBPD) and asked for the completed reports for two other high-profile officer-involved deadly shootings from 2001 and 2004. In the one case a troubled man reportedly with a toy gun was shot 29 times and bullets riddled several houses behind him. In another case, officers followed a suspect, lost track of him, and then started following a different man, 18-year-old Antonio Saldivar. Police shot him to death after they claimed he pulled a toy gun on them. The officer who shot Saldivar, by the way, has a disturbing disciplinary history, including allegations of excessive force.

Plenty of time had passed, so the reports should have been completed in those two cases. Well, the HBPD said I could have neither report because both are exempt from the California Public Records Act. What a great Catch-22: the public has no right to comment on police shootings until the investigation is complete, but once it is complete the public has no right to see the report.

In the teenaged girl’s case district-attorney (DA) investigators ultimately prepared a report arguing that the officers had “no choice” but to shoot. The DA’s office did not conduct any of its own interviews with witnesses. Investigators simply took the reports produced by the sheriff’s department, which detailed a “perfect storm” scenario: the police were backed up against a fence with nowhere to go; the girl lunged toward them; officers gently implored her to back away but reluctantly shot her as she intruded on their 21-foot safety barrier.

Although a local newsweekly easily found witnesses who stridently disputed that account, the DA was content with what it found. No Orange County district attorney has ever filed charges against police officers for an on-duty shooting, which is typical of most DAs. And district attorneys, by the way, only look at whether officers committed a crime—whether they fired the shots with criminal intent. But no one thinks there was criminal intent. DAs do not look at police procedures, and the newspapers were quick to find police training officials who declared that the officers “did what they are trained to do.”

That’s what is so worrisome.

As the MacDonald case reveals, despite many official oversight channels and processes, there is no serious oversight of police behavior. Law enforcement writes the rules of engagement, investigates its own officers, and has a well-oiled public-relations machine that kicks in whenever something disturbing takes place. District attorneys and grand juries are part of the law-enforcement establishment, and politicians usually defend the “heroic” officers. No information gets out until the family files a civil lawsuit against the department. No one ever discusses police policy, which is an internal matter.
Typical Shooting

Yet the MacDonald shooting is sadly typical. Here’s an Orange County Register report about a 2004 incident: “Robert Velarde said his son Jason stood beside the bed and appeared to freeze out of fear when four police officers, their guns drawn, entered the room the night of May 10. ‘They told him to drop the scissors. I told him to drop the scissors. He didn’t look like he could let them go, so I wrestled to take them away,’ said Velarde, a quadriplegic with partial use of his arms. . . . ‘Then one officer yelled ‘knife’ and they all fired,’ Velarde, 62, said. His son, Jason Velarde, 22, was killed.”

In September 2007, a 15-year-old autistic teen went missing. The mother called the sheriff’s department, which, she said, did nothing to help find him. Ten hours later, someone reported that a man was wandering around a busy street. It was the missing teen. Deputies responded by tasering the teen and then handcuffing him. The teen’s father said his son was tasered when he already was on the ground and that the deputies treated him roughly as he tried to comply with their orders. The sheriff’s department alternately claimed that the deputies had no choice but to taser the boy because they feared he might have a weapon and that they tasered him to protect him from himself.

In one case I recall several years ago, Anaheim police went to arrest an elderly doctor for a nonviolent crime. They drove one of those mini-tanks into his wealthy suburban neighborhood, black-clad SWAT-team members hanging onto the sides clutching high-powered rifles. (SWAT stands for Special Weapons and Tactics.)

Police often tell me, “Our only concern is getting home safely at the end of the day.” Such statements reveal two common traits in modern police forces. The first is an outsized sense of danger. In reality, police work isn’t in the top ten dangerous professions, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Indeed, no government job is in the top ten. The second attitude is the self-centered nature of police work. Concern for the public takes a backseat to concern for “officer safety.”

Police officials always depict their officers as reluctant warriors who rarely, if ever, use or even brandish their weapons. But this is a fiction from the past. Officers tell me the old-school guys are mostly gone and that the new breed of cop has a military mentality and often a military background. The SWAT-team members are the ones who do the training and get promoted to top positions in the departments.

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that police are far from reluctant to pull their weapons or feel much remorse when they do. After Riverside police gunned down a sleeping girl named Tyisha Miller in a car in 1998 (she had a gun in her lap, was unconscious, and after police smashed her window, she moved and they immediately opened fire), the officers involved in the shooting stood around, joked, and animatedly reenacted the shooting, according to Los Angeles Times reports. One of the officers commented, “This is going to ruin their Kwanzaa,” after upset family members showed up at the scene. One local man arrived at the scene of another officer-involved shooting and reported that the police were high-fiving each other.

In another recent local case, a Costa Mesa police officer admitted pulling a gun on a teenager after the officer noticed that the boy and his friends were riding their bikes without helmets. He chased the boy into the boy’s backyard and drew his gun. After the boy’s dog came to defend him, the officer shot the dog 15 times. The city paid the family a large sum of money, but the police department insists the officer’s behavior was correct police policy. That’s perhaps the scariest part of this whole disreputable incident.

Former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara, now a scholar at the Hoover Institution, captured the essence of the problem in a November 29, 2006, column he wrote for the Wall Street Journal. McNamara focused on an incident a few days earlier in New York, when several plainclothes police officers fired 50 shots at a car, wounding two men and killing a third, Sean Bell, who was to be married later that day.

How did this and other cases like it happen?

“Simply put,” wrote McNamara, “the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on ‘officer safety’ and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.”

According to McNamara, “Reasonable people accept that a cop’s job is difficult and dangerous, and most people understand that sometimes an officer will have to shoot someone. But the police are not and should never be allowed to think of themselves as soldiers or to believe they face the same level of danger.”

That’s exactly right. Even worse, there is virtually no public oversight or accountability, not only for police who follow these new policies and kill or hurt citizens, but for police who act outside proper authority and abuse their power. In Orange County, deputies spend about seven years patrolling the jail before being sent out onto the streets of our cities. Some critics wonder whether the experience dealing with prisoners leads at least some officers to treat members of the public with a high level of disdain. While police militarization is a problem on city streets, it is even worse for anyone under police custody.
Beaten by Inmates

In March of 2006, John Derek Chamberlain, who was stopped by an officer for public urination then arrested after he was found to possess child pornography, was savagely beaten to death for 20 minutes by fellow inmates. The Register reported that “[w]hile inmates beat John Derek Chamberlain to death, the senior deputy at the minimum-security barracks sat in the guard station, watching television. . . . The deputies’ failure to prevent the torture and killing of a man thought by jail inmates to be a child molester is at the center of an ongoing criminal inquiry.”

An inmate claims the deputy, who was several feet from the beating, actually instigated it after falsely outing Chamberlain as a child molester. Before any investigation was done, the county sheriff declared that his deputies did nothing wrong. Although other agencies typically investigate these killings, the sheriff’s department took charge of the investigation itself and even “cleaned up” the scene before the county supervisors’ staff arrived. The department refused to give the inmate a lie-detector test to corroborate his accusations. According to many solid sources, a group of deputies that calls itself “The Psycho Crew” routinely inflicts rough justice on inmates, picking particularly on minorities and drunks. The department denies this, but county taxpayers end up paying civil settlements to abused victims.

The Chamberlain case led to enough of a public outcry that the county board of supervisors voted to take the first steps toward creating an independent oversight panel. The sheriff, DA, and deputies’ union have tried to derail the proposal. It has been approved but the current plan, although useful, would create only a few advisory responsibilities. And, under current state law, almost all information regarding the disciplinary records of deputies and police are off-limits to civilian oversight panels, the public, and the media. As the American Civil Liberties Union explained, “On August 29, 2006, the California Supreme Court in Copley Press v. Superior Court held that records of an administrative appeal of sustained misconduct charges are confidential and may not be disclosed to the public. The decision prevents the public from learning the extent to which police officers have been disciplined as a result of misconduct.”

Police supporters claim the public already has plenty of oversight. But observers always find the same pattern: The internal investigations are not public, and the deputies stay on the force with no obvious punishment. The DA exonerates the deputies. The grand jury only gets involved in the most highly publicized cases, and such juries are controlled by the DA and represent a narrow, conservative demographic. (Around here, it’s mostly retired government workers who can afford to spend half their day working at the court for virtually no pay.) When a member of the public files a complaint with a police or sheriff’s department, it typically takes months to hear anything back. Then the only legal requirement is for the agency to say whether the complaint was “sustained” or “not sustained.” Such complaints are rarely sustained.
Code of Silence

Even when police engage in obvious misbehavior, fellow officers stand by the miscreants. There’s a well-known “code of silence.” Many people have watched the videotape of the savage beating of a barmaid by an off-duty Chicago police officer. The department had to be shamed into filing serious charges, and fellow officers showed up in force in solidarity when their compatriot had his court date. Juries in suburban communities are notoriously conservative, so when a case gets to trial, it’s difficult to convict an ill-behaving cop. In February former Irvine Police Officer David Alex Park went to court for pulling over a woman motorist, threatening to arrest her, but letting her off after she performed a sex act. Park argued that he pulled the victim over for her own safety and that the sex was consensual—as if sex could ever be consensual when an armed police officer has pulled a woman over and threatens to take her to jail.

The jury, however, bought the argument, and Park went free. He did lose his job, however, and the woman received a civil settlement from the city. Indeed, the only real oversight and justice in police-abuse cases comes from trial attorneys who sue police departments. It’s better than nothing, and such actions often dislodge police documents, but it’s a sad day when the only serious oversight of the most powerful government agents most people will encounter comes in the tort system. In many cases when police are caught abusing their power, their union defends them and keeps them on the force.

No wonder police officers behave as if they can do as they please. The Los Angeles Times reported last October 4 that Los Angeles County deputies play a game on the job called “Operation Any Booking,” in which the winner is the deputy who makes the most arrests or most car seizures in a 24-hour period. “It’s just a friendly competition to have a little fun out here,” said the department spokesman. Never mind that such “games” encourage officers to make unnecessary arrests and seizures.

Officers at times behave like they are part of an occupying army, and there are many stories of excessive force that don’t rise to the level of investigations and lawsuits, but are indicative of what’s going on out there. One of the Register’s independent contractors who services newspaper racks in the wee hours of the morning tells about the time recently when he was emptying money from a rack while wearing his newspaper apron and he saw an officer looking at him. Rather than approach and ask him what he was doing, several police cars surrounded him and officers came at him with weapons drawn; he was shoved to the ground, his arms painfully wrenched behind his back, and he was even taunted by an officer. He was let go after a short time, but is this really the way we want our communities policed?

Police officers in California in particular are well paid, so this is not a case of insufficient funds to hire quality candidates, as some people argue. In Orange County the average deputy earns a total salary and benefit package of $111,000 a year. They are eligible to retire at age 50 with 90 percent of their final pay after 30 years of service, guaranteed forever, courtesy of taxpayers. Police agencies in California complain about a hiring shortage. The reason for the shortage is simple: a) rapid increases in retirement benefits have encouraged a large portion of local forces to retire; and b) unions are always lobbying cities to provide more police positions, and politicians often comply for political reasons. Who can say no? Police and deputies, after all, have been afforded near-hero status following the 9/11 attacks. And the media often provide photo ops for their anti-terrorism training exercises, so the public knows about the importance of their work. In a recent political battle police organizations made direct references to 9/11 as a reason to oppose any rollback of benefits. Politicians who go against the blue tide pay a heavy political price.

There’s no apparent limit to the political gains that can be made by pandering to the “law and order” crowd. Last June the Assembly Public Safety Committee considered a bill that would have overturned the Copley decision and restored some public oversight to police misbehavior. The room was filled with police officers speaking out against it. The cops told emotional stories about police officers being killed in the line of duty—even though news reports later revealed that none of the examples had anything to do with the release of public records. The committee could not muster a single Democratic or Republican vote for the bill. In the state legislature Democrats mostly oppose such reforms because of their ties to the unions, and Republicans mostly oppose such bills because of their commitment to “law and order.” It’s the perfect scenario for law enforcement, and a troubling one for the public.

Yet something needs to be done. While I was writing this article, the Santa Ana police gunned down an apparently unarmed man in a stolen car, and then shut down the freeway for five hours. The department would say nothing, according to the Los Angeles Times: the police spokesman “referred questions to the district attorney’s office, which investigates officer-related shootings. A spokeswoman declined to discuss the probe, citing district attorney policy.” And so it goes.

Police use deadly force at their discretion. Police agencies then investigate themselves. They release only the information they choose to release. Few politicians are willing to discuss police procedures, and the courts and legislatures uphold the “right” of police agencies to hide information about misbehaving officers. In California, police have a special officer’s “bill of rights.” America may not be a police state—that is, a political system characterized “by an arbitrary exercise of power by police”—but it’s getting too close for comfort.

[Mr Bean]

I was reading the piece fine right up until this paragraph

“Simply put,” wrote McNamara, “the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on ‘officer safety’ and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.”

Breep Breep Breep! Warning Weapon Ignorance Detected, Personal Bias detected, Breep Breep!
Regard piece as Opinion piece from here on in.

Seriously, they had me there for a good while, I was thinking "Oh those bastard cops right up until we hit this part" 9mm is not "high caliber" in fact .38's are bigger than several 9mm sizes
Click for bigger image


Second, they've always carried shot-guns, and since the North Hollywood shoot-out, I've heard more and more second-hand reports of cops wanting to have access to higher caliber weaponry in cases where suspects might be wearing body armor. I've yet to see cops walking around with AK's or M14/16's. Even if I know SWAT has access to that kind of weaponry I've yet to hear about police using them.

Which turns the entire piece into an internal question of "what facts got edited out" so he could make the point he wanted to make which seems to be that cops are running amok, shooting people and getting away with it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The article IS overblown and sensationalistic, but at the same time it does nicely explain why my attitude to the police--let them do whatever they want to you and keep addressing them politely and obediently no matter what it is--really is suited for minorities trying to survive in modern area. OTOH it really isn't that often that police shoot and kill. At least in Portland, OR, the police were involved in 4.4 fatal shootings per year during the height of the cocaine wars in the late 80's / early 90's, which for the force size at that time works out to one fatal shooting per every six officers' full lifetime service. So only about 15 - 16% of police in a major city have actually shot and killed someone over their entire careers. The question is if the figure in question has changed in the last 17 years. If it has gone up substantially, then there is more serious cause for concern.

[Morilore]

Seriously, they had me there for a good while, I was thinking "Oh those bastard cops right up until we hit this part" 9mm is not "high caliber" in fact .38's are bigger than several 9mm sizes

So wait, you dismiss the article as a "biased" "opinion piece" (as if one isn't supposed to expect that whenever Einhander posts anything in NP) because of two sentences where some guy the author quoted showed he didn't understand guns?

[Drooling Iguana]

I was reading the piece fine right up until this paragraph

<snip>

You mean the paragraph that consisted entirely of a quote from a former police chief? But then again I suppose a former police chief wouldn't know anything about the sort of weapons the police use.

[Uraniun235]

At least in Portland, OR, the police were involved in 4.4 fatal shootings per year during the height of the cocaine wars in the late 80's / early 90's, which for the force size at that time works out to one fatal shooting per every six officers' full lifetime service. So only about 15 - 16% of police in a major city have actually shot and killed someone over their entire careers. The question is if the figure in question has changed in the last 17 years. If it has gone up substantially, then there is more serious cause for concern.

I'm not sure Portland would really rank as a "major" American city, I think it might be a bit small for that; the city itself is 29th most populous in the US and the metro area is only 23rd. I would hesitate to extrapolate from Portland to reach a conclusion about American police forces in general with regard to the article, especially when it seems like the article is focused on Orange County - which, if I remember right, is near or is itself the birthplace of the SWAT team concept as we know it today.

[Darth Wong]

I've yet to see cops walking around with AK's or M14/16's.

I saw this guy in New York City. There was no emergency or violence in the area at the time. It was just a typical afternoon.

[Lonestar]

I've yet to see cops walking around with AK's or M14/16's.

I saw this guy in New York City. There was no emergency or violence in the area at the time. It was just a typical afternoon.

Feh. More heavily armed gentlemen in front of the Pentagon.


By the way, you can always tell when a major protest is scheduled for outside the Pentagon(as opposed to the same 6 people out there everyday) when you step off the Metro and see a bunch of Pentagon Police(Unlike the goons mentioned in that other thread, they are actually police officers whose jurisdiction is the Pentagon) walking around on the train platform with UMPs. I'm kind of surprised there's been no accidents yet.

[Hawkwings]

I know the NYPD has these things called "Hercules Teams" that sometimes go around and do a "show of force" demonstration or something. It's apparently meant to show the populace that yes, the NYPD has badass guys with big guns and isn't afraid to use them, so don't worry about those damn criminals, we've got it under control!

Incidentally, where was that picture taken? Perhaps there was something going on inside that building?

[Oscar Wilde]

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/feature ... an-police/

In another recent local case, a Costa Mesa police officer admitted pulling a gun on a teenager after the officer noticed that the boy and his friends were riding their bikes without helmets. He chased the boy into the boy’s backyard and drew his gun. After the boy’s dog came to defend him, the officer shot the dog 15 times. The city paid the family a large sum of money, but the police department insists the officer’s behavior was correct police policy. That’s perhaps the scariest part of this whole disreputable incident.

This is, if true, completely terrifying.

You know, if a cops first reaction to a teenager with a knife is to shoot them, or if you're preparing a non lethal solution and "run out of time" maybe you shouldn't be a cop or go for a shot that will stop them, but not kill them.

And if you feel the need to chase down a boy riding a bike without a helmet and then shoot a dog that is trying to stop a stranger from entering his yard, you really don't need to be issued a gun.

[Eulogy]

The article IS overblown and sensationalistic, but at the same time it does nicely explain why my attitude to the police--let them do whatever they want to you and keep addressing them politely and obediently no matter what it is--really is suited for minorities trying to survive in modern area.

Even if what they want is to kill you, rape your family and torture your pets? I have a hard time believing you'd keep your cool if they shot one of your loved ones.

[tim31]

Police in Victoria shot a kid dead last year because he threatened them with a knife. There was a general reaction of outrage and 'why didn't they shoot him in the leg?'(lol Hollywood)

I agree with the article in general, but it is annoying when people try to use shaky facts to further justify an already solid position:

You mean the paragraph that consisted entirely of a quote from a former police chief? But then again I suppose a former police chief wouldn't know anything about the sort of weapons the police use.

Then I daresay it's a quote taken out of context, or the 'former' police chief is completely uninformed. Anyone who's fired a .38 revolver back-to-back with a 9mm pistol knows that the former has decidedly more stopping power.

[Darth Wong]

I know the NYPD has these things called "Hercules Teams" that sometimes go around and do a "show of force" demonstration or something. It's apparently meant to show the populace that yes, the NYPD has badass guys with big guns and isn't afraid to use them, so don't worry about those damn criminals, we've got it under control!

Incidentally, where was that picture taken? Perhaps there was something going on inside that building?

In front of the J.P. Morgan building, which appeared to be under construction or renovation or something like that. There was scaffolding on parts of it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The article IS overblown and sensationalistic, but at the same time it does nicely explain why my attitude to the police--let them do whatever they want to you and keep addressing them politely and obediently no matter what it is--really is suited for minorities trying to survive in modern area.

Even if what they want is to kill you, rape your family and torture your pets? I have a hard time believing you'd keep your cool if they shot one of your loved ones.

If the police actively want to kill you, you're going to die, and at which point the only question is if you're bloody-minded enough to fight back anyway to make them suffer as much as possible. But the police are for the most part not actively trying to kill people. They just respond to the slightest provocation with lethal force, ergo, do not provide them even the slightest provocation. That is what I was trying to say. If they're going to torture my pets, yes, I'd let them. Or for that matter inflict indignities on my family, because as you can see resisting them gets you a hail of dozens of rounds of ammunition.

I am however talking about simply being polite and obedient when stopped by the police, more to avoid detention than anything else.

[Darth Wong]

I've said many times that an obsequious comportment is the only prudent way to approach police officers. It's still true; people who pick fights with police officers are often given a summary punishment for stupidity. Is it unjust? Yes. A police officer cannot make "you pissed me off" into a criminal offense. But that's the way things are, and it's foolish not to recognize it.

[tim31]

In front of the J.P. Morgan building, which appeared to be under construction or renovation or something like that. There was scaffolding on parts of it.

The thing of it is, I'd like to know(yeah, impossible) a correlated statistic for the amount of times an officer armed with a service pistol has to actually draw the weapon, versus how many times an officer with a a ballistic vest, helmet, and an assault rifle has to level said weapon. One of those says 'don't fuck with me' a lot more than the other.

[Samuel]

In front of the J.P. Morgan building, which appeared to be under construction or renovation or something like that. There was scaffolding on parts of it.

The thing of it is, I'd like to know(yeah, impossible) a correlated statistic for the amount of times an officer armed with a service pistol has to actually draw the weapon, versus how many times an officer with a a ballistic vest, helmet, and an assault rifle has to level said weapon. One of those says 'don't fuck with me' a lot more than the other.

An assault rifle in a busy street. Wouldn't this result in a horrific amount of accidental shootings if it was needed?

[Tanasinn]

Unless the officer is a complete fucking moron whose inspiration is one of the Omaha Beach machine gunners, no.

I can't speak to the dangers of overpenetration on a trained user firing and hitting a person, though.

[Questor]

I'm not sure Portland would really rank as a "major" American city, I think it might be a bit small for that; the city itself is 29th most populous in the US and the metro area is only 23rd. I would hesitate to extrapolate from Portland to reach a conclusion about American police forces in general with regard to the article, especially when it seems like the article is focused on Orange County - which, if I remember right, is near or is itself the birthplace of the SWAT team concept as we know it today.

The SWAT concept was created by the LAPD, one county to the north, but I would not be surprised if there are as many SWAT officers in Orange County as LA. Having a SWAT team seams to be a prestige item for the local police forces.

[Darth Wong]

In front of the J.P. Morgan building, which appeared to be under construction or renovation or something like that. There was scaffolding on parts of it.

The thing of it is, I'd like to know(yeah, impossible) a correlated statistic for the amount of times an officer armed with a service pistol has to actually draw the weapon, versus how many times an officer with a a ballistic vest, helmet, and an assault rifle has to level said weapon. One of those says 'don't fuck with me' a lot more than the other.

Well, the guy in my picture certainly gave off a rather noticeable "don't fuck with me" vibe, at least from a distance. Mind you, he was cordial enough when I approached him. I actually walked up and asked him if he would mind posing for a picture, but he said he couldn't. Too undignified, perhaps? Or maybe there's a rule about that.

[JointStrikeFighter]

So you covertly took the picture anyway?

[Darth Wong]

So you covertly took the picture anyway?

He didn't mind me taking a picture of him. He just didn't want to pose with me for another one. I thought it would be amusing to have a picture of myself standing next to the cop, or perhaps even pretending to get arrested by him. But he was either not feeling playful or he felt it would compromise his duties.

PS. Obviously, I was not deterred from approaching him. Quite the contrary; I actually felt quite safe in his vicinity. What criminal is going to try something within a hundred feet of that guy?

[Hawkwings]

What, did you ask for the "Imperial Stormtrooper Special" pose?

Perhaps Wong took the picture first, then asked for a pose? I would certainly understand the whole not posing because it's undignified thing. Also, he's trying to be a visual deterrent, and posing for tourists certainly doesn't help that image.

[tim31]

Won't pose for photos?

Queens Guard - Buckingham Palace - does not pose for photos

Swiss Guard - Vatican City - does not pose for photos

Paramilitary Guard - World Finance Ground Zero - does not pose for photos

A pattern?

[Darth Wong]

Won't pose for photos?

Queens Guard - Buckingham Palace - does not pose for photos

Swiss Guard - Vatican City - does not pose for photos

Paramilitary Huard - World Finance Ground Zero - does not pose for photos

A pattern?

Yeah, but the guards at Buckingham Palace and Vatican City are ceremonial. This guy, on the other hand, was a working dude. I thought he'd probably say no, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask.