Interesting anecdote, I'm mixed. Black & Hispanic.

I love Jamaican Beef/Chicken/Veggie patties. Spicy & delicious!

However, the one spot around here that's owned & run by Jamaican folks has shitty service.

There's always an line & an attitude.

One day, I waited in line for like 20 minutes just to get a Spinach pattie.

When I got to the front, I order .. but of course.. THEY'RE OUT!

As I leave, the owner says. "Next time, just call ahead."
Like it's my fault.

WTF! Are you serious?! That's like me calling Taco Bell to make sure they have chalupas.

All I could think was "WHY ARE JAMAICAN PEOPLE SO SHITTY!?"

I was shocked by my own bigoted thought.

My father - a black man - told be a long time ago "I don't like Jamaicans. Don't trust them"

I thought he was just being his usual bigoted self.

But nope, ten years or so later and here I find myself distrusting ALL Jamaican people.

I'm black & hispanic.
I'm sorta racist toward Jamaicans. ..and white people.

Full Disclosure:

I live in the south so.. I assume any old white person with a drawl is just barely holding back from saying something racist as fuck.

I'm also aware that the rate of police shootings of young black males is the same as the rate of lynchings of black males in the Jim Crow era.

So of course I don't trust cops. Yes, even black ones.

In conclusion -
People are racist. Cops are People. Cops are racist.

If i understand you correctly, every time you refresh this page views may jump at different rates. One through four views per refresh? If so just know that views are internet wide. All people members and mostly non members that stumble across this post. From what i can tell on a quick check the average views of non members to members on videos is seven to one(im estimating from a small sample). so if a video says 70 views may be only 10 sifters that have seen it. Not sure if this type thing is what you are referring to.

also as a side note (full disclosure) i have a buzz (fancy tequila), so I may not be making sense


Also...I LOVE YOU MAN

Yeah it's the editing that sells this video... Wish I thought of that when I posted this (full disclosure my kid dancing to lord of the Dance at 3): http://youtu.be/izfal8uqmns lol.

And how exactly does it dismiss it? I no where said that gay men must be flamboyant. I said that suggesting that gay men must look and act straight or face the consequences is deeply problematic. I have no problem with gay men who feel they only differ from straight men with respect to who they like to date. I do have a problem with someone suggesting that ALL gay men need to look and act that way. To me that seems like trying to manage difference so it's palatable to mainstream norms.

Full disclosure: I'm a transsexual, and unless you were extremely lucky or started transitioning before the onset of puberty, that means spending part of your transition, or in the worst case the rest of your life, looking visibly "not normal" to everyone else. I was not flamboyant, I was polite, unassuming, and did my best to fit in, but for a few years my mere existence was, to many people, as obnoxious and offensive as the flamboyant man in this video. Does that mean I deserved the hate and discrimination I got? I sure hope not. The fact that this video seems to say don't look different or you'll get what's coming to you, hits a nerve for me because for several years I COULDN'T look "normal" however much I wanted to. I'm just thankful I'm past that phase and people now see me as I see myself, treat me how I want to be treated, and I can live a "normal" life, because if this video is anything to go by then that's the hurdle you have to clear before you've earned the right not to be hated or discriminated against.

While I think the ad is tasteless, I thought large chain business built on reputation were above this, they haven't done anything legally wrong here.

If she posed for the photos, and was paid by the photographer as the model, she had to have signed a disclosure contract that allowed the photographer to sell her image. I'm guessing that it wasn't Burger King she posed for when these photos were taken but an independent photographer, or image bank like Getty Images.

So once she has modeled and collected her paycheck, (or maybe, no paycheck), she has entered into a contract whereby the photographer or artist who took the photos has full say on how those images are used, in this case sold to a major fast food chain.

And it's not Rape. In now way is this rape. Disappointing and a bit embarrassing and by-and-large a completely inappropriate ad for a family focused restaurant chain. But then Burger King is know for it's sometimes inappropriate ads.

I will also say that it was an unprofessional move to buy the model footage and not take their own photos with a willing model. Big companies who can afford it, should never be purchasing stock photos from a service for this very reason, someone will notice and call them out. Big companies have a professional reputation to uphold. This ad campaign was a cop-out, without professionalism.

I'll bet this ad was created by a secondary party as well, and not by Burger King staff creative. Sometimes large corporations can't police every ad that is made in their name - which is unfortunate. I work for a small company and it's often a nightmare trying to police all the creative that gets made which doesn't get filtered through the Public Affairs department.

Oh yeah, I remember this live...we all said WTF was that?!?
Full disclosure, I had a mac 512k at the time...near top of the line! It had, like, 256 different shades of grey! AMAZING!

Thanks mate, very nice comment of you.

Always like to hear different viewpoints, makes me consider ideas I hadn't and also bulk up my own point of view, so all good

I suppose they're all specific specialities of the broader business field, I would also add accounting but they are very broadly interrelated. For example in bank lending decisions, discounted cash flow estimations (finance) which are reliant on income statement and balance sheet information are just as important as IS/BS audit expertise (accounting) which assesses the credibility of their reporting. This is especially true for smaller, privately owned entities (who obviously can't rely on public equity, so are generally bank reliant). Large publicly listed companies have much more stringent auditing requirements already, and public disclosure means that they are highly open to scrutiny.

Economics beyond 101 basics is generally is more of an academic niche. The macroeconomic side looking at large scale GDP, inflation, employment etc., is relied upon in government, treasuries and policy think tanks. Large listed companies would certainly have a dedicated in-house team for consultations. Medium sized companies might contract dedicated industry research consultant firms, but outside of that their use is quite limited.

The microeconomic side is industry specific looking at competitive behaviour inter-firm, with suppliers and customers. It's generally a more wishy washy field which introduces some amateur psychology via behavioural economics and game theory. It's more of an academic field really. I can imagine large multinationals with few competitors employing them or hiring consultants. We have a near duopoly here in supermarkets and I can see them using microeconomic theory in pricing decisions for example.

Two words: Vanilla Ice.

How much worse could it be? Well, okay, the first one was alright. It would be cool if they went further back to their roots and they were more like real teenagers instead of a middle-aged focus group's opinion of what adolescents associate with being a teenager. Hint: it's beer, not pizza.

edit: Full disclosure, when I was 12, I waited in line for an hour to get tickets when the first TMNT movie opened.

in keeping with my previous policy toward this "user's" profuse dribble though I may read it later to determine suitability to disclosure...(took him awhile didn't it...wonder why?...)

Seconded.

If your "Thats racist!!!" comment requires the qualifier "because he's black", you're wrong. You're an asshole and you're just wrong.

TBH i didn't even notice the slip-up, because unlike "epithet", "epitaph" is not part of my vocabulary and i just immediately understood him.

but why in god's name would anyone let private locker room exchanges damper their faith in our nation's progression towards equality for all?
There are so many many hateful & bigoted actions committed every day, and you want to soapbox about some guy playing it loose with offensible language...

Just to take it a little bit too far, which of these men is letting skin color more strongly influence the judgements they're making?

Edit: full disclosure i have no idea who any of these people are, what rumors they are talking about, or what is a football

Edit2: just saw the voicemail message LOL HOLY SHIT it is 4chan worthy! racial slurs aside it is the most verbally abusive thing i've seen in a long time (but i still don't know them, so thats just how it feels to me). if i got a message half that severe, i would probably shit myself on the spot (but im not a big tough footballist)

What I didn't write was, "In the interest of full disclosure, this observation is from the Washington Times." Thanks for responding to what I didn't write.

In the interest of full disclosure is this observation from the Washington Times. Notice the quote from one of the Park Rangers.

The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. That was after they barred the new World War II Memorial on the Mall to veterans of World War II. But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. The ladies bought it years ago to preserve it as a national memorial. The feds closed access to the parking lots this week, even though the lots are jointly owned with the Mount Vernon ladies. The rangers are from the government, and they’re only here to help.
“It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”


Yep. Kinder and gentler.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/3/pruden-the-cheap-tricks-of-the-game/

I see a lot of talk, and absolutely zero proof, and he seems to base his "disclosure" on some conspiracy theory literature given to him.

I too wish to live to see the day we get to meet visitors from out of our world, but this is hardly convincing.

"Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A leaked top-secret order has revealed the Obama administration is conducting a massive domestic surveillance program by collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon Business customers. Last night The Guardian newspaper published a classified order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court directing Verizon’s Business Network Services to give the National Security Agency electronic data, including all calling records on a, quote, "ongoing, daily basis." The order covers each phone number dialed by all customers along with location and routing data, and with the duration and frequency of the calls, but not the content of the communications. The order expressly compels Verizon to turn over records for both international and domestic records. It also forbids Verizon from disclosing the existence of the court order. It is unclear if other phone companies were ordered to hand over similar information.

AMY GOODMAN: According to legal analysts, the Obama administration relied on a controversial provision in the USA PATRIOT Act, Section 215, that authorizes the government to seek secret court orders for the production of, quote, "any tangible thing relevant to a foreign intelligence or terrorism investigation." The disclosure comes just weeks after news broke that the Obama administration had been spying on journalists from the Associated Press and James Rosen, a reporter from Fox News.

We’re now joined by two former employees of the National Security Agency, Thomas Drake and William Binney. In 2010, the Obama administration charged Drake with violating the Espionage Act after he was accused of leaking classified information to the press about waste and mismanagement at the agency. The charges were later dropped. William Binney worked for almost 40 years at the NSA. He resigned shortly after the September 11th attacks over his concern over the increasing surveillance of Americans. We’re also joined in studio here by Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

First, for your legal opinion, Shayana, can you talk about the significance of what has just been revealed?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Sure. So I think, you know, we have had stories, including one in USA Today in May 2006, that have said that the government is collecting basically all the phone records from a number of large telephone companies. What’s significant about yesterday’s disclosure is that it’s the first time that we’ve seen the order, to really appreciate the sort of staggeringly broad scope of what one of the judges on this Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved of, and the first time that we can now confirm that this was under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which, you know, has been dubbed the libraries provision, because people were mostly worried about the idea that the government would use it to get library records. Now we know that they’re using it to get phone records. And just to see the immense scope of this warrant order, you know, when most warrants are very narrow, is really shocking as a lawyer.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, some might argue that the Obama administration at least went to the FISA court to get approval for this, unlike the Bush administration in the past.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. Well, we don’t know if the Bush administration was, you know, getting these same orders and if this is just a continuation, a renewal order. It lasted for only—it’s supposed to last for only three months, but they may have been getting one every three months since 2006 or even earlier. You know, when Congress reapproved this authority in 2011, you know, one of the things Congress thought was, well, at least they’ll have to present these things to a judge and get some judicial review, and Congress will get some reporting of the total number of orders. But when one order covers every single phone record for a massive phone company like Verizon, the reporting that gets to Congress is going to be very hollow. And then, similarly, you know, when the judges on the FISA court are handpicked by the chief justice, and the government can go to a judge, as they did here, in North Florida, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, who’s 73 years old and is known as a draconian kind of hanging judge in his sentencing, and get some order that’s this broad, I think both the judicial review and the congressional oversight checks are very weak.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, this is just Verizon, because that’s what Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian got a hold of. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other orders for the other telephone companies, right?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: Like BellSouth, like AT&T, etc.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: As there have been in the past.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Yeah, those were—those were companies mentioned in that USA Today story in 2006. Nothing about the breadth of this order indicates that it’s tied to any particular national security investigation, as the statute says it has to be. So, some commentators yesterday said, "Well, this order came out on—you know, it’s dated 10 days after the Boston attacks." But it’s forward-looking. It goes forward for three months. Why would anyone need to get every record from Verizon Business in order to investigate the Boston bombings after they happened?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, William Binney, a decades-long veteran of the NSA, your reaction when you heard about this news?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, this was just the FBI going after data. That was their request. And they’re doing that because they—if they want to try to get it—they have to have it approved by a court in order to get it as evidence into a courtroom. But NSA has been doing all this stuff all along, and it’s been all the companies, not just one. And I basically looked at that and said, well, if Verizon got one, so did everybody else, which means that, you know, they’re just continuing the collection of this kind of information on all U.S. citizens. That’s one of the main reasons they couldn’t tell Senator Wyden, with his request of how many U.S. citizens are in the NSA databases. There’s just—in my estimate, it was—if you collapse it down to all uniques, it’s a little over 280 million U.S. citizens are in there, each in there several hundred to several thousand times.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, let’s go to Senator Wyden. A secret court order to obtain the Verizon phone records was sought by the FBI under a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that was expanded by the PATRIOT Act. In 2011, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden warned about how the government was interpreting its surveillance powers under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

SEN. RON WYDEN: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the PATRIOT Act, they are going to be stunned, and they are going to be angry. And they’re going asked senators, "Did you know what this law actually permits? Why didn’t you know before you voted on it?" The fact is, anyone can read the plain text of the PATRIOT Act, and yet many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified. It’s almost as if there were two PATRIOT Acts, and many members of Congress have not read the one that matters. Our constituents, of course, are totally in the dark. Members of the public have no access to the secret legal interpretations, so they have no idea what their government believes the law actually means.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Senator Ron Wyden. He and Senator Udall have been raising concerns because they sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee but cannot speak out openly exactly about what they know. William Binney, you left the agency after September 2001, deeply concerned—this is after you’d been there for 40 years—about the amount of surveillance of U.S. citizens. In the end, your house was raided. You were in the shower. You’re a diabetic amputee. The authorities had a gun at your head. Which agency had the gun at your head, by the way?

WILLIAM BINNEY: That was the FBI.

AMY GOODMAN: You were not charged, though you were terrorized. Can you link that to what we’re seeing today?

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, it’s directly linked, because it has to do with all of the surveillance of the U.S. citizens that’s been going on since 9/11. I mean, that’s—they were getting—from just one company alone, that I knew of, they were getting over 300 million call records a day on U.S. citizens. So, I mean, and when you add the rest of the companies in, my estimate was that there were probably three billion phone records collected every day on U.S. citizens. So, over time, that’s a little over 12 trillion in their databases since 9/11. And that’s just phones; that doesn’t count the emails. And they’re avoiding talking about emails there, because that’s also collecting content of what people are saying. And that’s in the databases that NSA has and that the FBI taps into. It also tells you how closely they’re related. When the FBI asks for data and the court approves it, the data is sent to NSA, because they’ve got all the algorithms to do the diagnostics and community reconstructions and things like that, so that the FBI can—makes it easier for the FBI to interpret what’s in there.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We’re also joined by Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted by the Obama administration after he blew the whistle on mismanagement and waste and constitutional violations at the NSA. Thomas Drake, your reaction to this latest revelation?

THOMAS DRAKE: My reaction? Where has the mainstream media been? This is routine. These are routine orders. This is nothing new. What’s new is we’re actually seeing an actual order. And people are somehow surprised by it. The fact remains that this program has been in place for quite some time. It was actually started shortly after 9/11. The PATRIOT Act was the enabling mechanism that allowed the United States government in secret to acquire subscriber records of—from any company that exists in the United States.

I think what people are now realizing is that this isn’t just a terrorist issue. This is simply the ability of the government in secret, on a vast scale, to collect any and all phone call records, including domestic to domestic, local, as well as location information. We might—there’s no need now to call this the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Let’s just call it the surveillance court. It’s no longer about foreign intelligence. It’s simply about harvesting millions and millions and millions of phone call records and beyond. And this is only just Verizon. As large as Verizon is, with upwards of 100 million subscribers, what about all the other telecoms? What about all the other Internet service providers? It’s become institutionalized in this country, in the greatest of secrecy, for the government to classify, conceal not only the facts of the surveillance, but also the secret laws that are supporting surveillance.

AMY GOODMAN: Thomas Drake, what can they do with this information, what’s called metadata? I mean, they don’t have the content of the conversation, supposedly—or maybe we just don’t see that, that’s under another request, because, remember, we are just seeing this one, for people who are listening and watching right now, this one request that is specifically to—and I also want to ask you: It’s Verizon Business Services; does that have any significance? But what does it mean to have the length of time and not the names of, but where the call originates and where it is going, the phone numbers back and forth?

THOMAS DRAKE: You get incredible amounts of information about subscribers. It’s basically the ability to forward-profile, as well as look backwards, all activities associated with those phone numbers, and not only just the phone numbers and who you called and who called you, but also the community of interests beyond that, who they were calling. I mean, we’re talking about a phenomenal set of records that is continually being added to, aggregated, year after year and year, on what have now become routine orders. Now, you add the location information, that’s a tracking mechanism, monitoring tracking of all phone calls that are being made by individuals. I mean, this is an extraordinary breach. I’ve said this for years. Our representing attorney, Jesselyn Radack from the Government Accountability Project, we’ve been saying this for years and no—from the wilderness. We’ve had—you’ve been on—you know, you’ve had us on your show in the past, but it’s like, hey, everybody kind of went to sleep, you know, while the government is harvesting all these records on a routine basis.

You’ve got to remember, none of this is probable cause. This is simply the ability to collect. And as I was told shortly after 9/11, "You don’t understand, Mr. Drake. We just want the data." And so, the secret surveillance regime really has a hoarding complex, and they can’t get enough of it. And so, here we’re faced with the reality that a government in secret, in abject violation of the Fourth Amendment, under the cover of enabling act legislation for the past 12 years, is routinely analyzing what is supposed to be private information. But, hey, it doesn’t matter anymore, right? Because we can get to it. We have secret agreements with the telecoms and Internet service providers and beyond. And we can do with the data anything we want.

So, you know, I sit here—I sit here as an American, as I did shortly after 9/11, and it’s all déjà vu for me. And then I was targeted—it’s important to note, I—not just for massive fraud, waste and abuse; I was specifically targeted as the source for The New York Times article that came out in December of 2005. They actually thought that I was the secret source regarding the secret surveillance program. Ultimately, I was charged under the Espionage Act. So that should tell you something. Sends an extraordinarily chilling message. It is probably the deepest, darkest secret of both administrations, greatly expanded under the Obama administration. It’s now routine practice.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Shayana, I’d like to ask you, specifically that issue of the FISA court also authorizing domestic surveillance. I mean, is there—even with the little laws that we have left, is there any chance for that to be challenged, that the FISA court is now also authorizing domestic records being surveiled?

AMY GOODMAN: FISA being Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. I mean, you know, two things about that. First, the statute says that there have to be reasonable grounds to think that this information is relevant to an investigation of either foreign terrorist activity or something to do with a foreign power. So, you know, obviously, this perhaps very compliant judge approved this order, but it doesn’t seem like this is what Congress intended these orders would look like. Seems like, on the statute, that Congress intended they would be somewhat narrower than this, right?

But there’s a larger question, which is that, for years, the Supreme Court, since 1979, has said, "We don’t have the same level of protection over, you know, the calling records—the numbers that we dial and how long those calls are and when they happen—as we do over the contents of a phone call, where the government needs a warrant." So everyone assumes the government needs a warrant to get at your phone records and maybe at your emails, but it’s not true. They just basically need a subpoena under existing doctrine. And so, the government uses these kind of subpoenas to get your email records, your web surfing records, you know, cloud—documents in cloud storage, banking records, credit records. For all these things, they can get these extraordinarily broad subpoenas that don’t even need to go through a court.

AMY GOODMAN: Shayana, talk about the significance of President Obama nominating James Comey to be the head of the FBI—

SHAYANA KADIDAL: One of the—

AMY GOODMAN: —and who he was.

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. One of the grand ironies is that Obama has nominated a Republican who served in the Bush administration for a long time, a guy with a reputation as being kind of personally incorruptable. I think, in part, he nominated him to be the head of the FBI, the person who would, you know, be responsible for seeking and renewing these kind of orders in the future, for the next 10 years—he named Comey, a Republican, because he wanted to, I think, distract from the phone record scandal, the fact that Holder’s Justice Department has gone after the phone records of the Associated Press and of Fox News reporter James Rosen, right?

And you asked, what can you tell from these numbers? Well, if you see the reporter called, you know, five or six of his favorite sources and then wrote a particular report that divulged some embarrassing government secret, that’s—you know, that’s just as good as hearing what the reporter was saying over the phone line. And so, we had this huge, you know, scandal over the fact that the government went after the phone records of AP, when now we know they’re going after everyone’s phone records, you know. And I think one of the grand ironies is that, you know, he named Comey because he had this reputation as being kind of a stand-up guy, who stood up to Bush in John Ashcroft’s hospital room in 2004 and famously said, "We have to cut back on what the NSA is doing." But what the NSA was doing was probably much broader than what The New York Times finally divulged in that story in December ’05.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, will Glenn Greenwald now be investigated, of The Guardian, who got the copy of this, so that they can find his leak, not to mention possibly prosecute him?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Oh, I think absolutely there will be some sort of effort to go after him punitively. The government rarely tries to prosecute people who are recognized as journalists. And so, Julian Assange maybe is someone they try to portray as not a journalist. Glenn Greenwald, I think, would be harder to do. But there are ways of going after them punitively that don’t involve prosecution, like going after their phone records so their sources dry up.

AMY GOODMAN: I saw an astounding comment by Pete Williams, who used to be the Pentagon spokesperson, who’s now with NBC, this morning, talking—he had talked with Attorney General Eric Holder, who had said, when he goes after the reporters—you know, the AP reporters, the Fox reporter—they’re not so much going after them; not to worry, they’re going after the whistleblowers. They’re trying to get, through them, the people. What about that, that separation of these two?

SHAYANA KADIDAL: Right. I’ll give you an example from the AP. They had a reporter named, I believe, John Solomon. In 2000, he reported a story about the botched investigation into Robert Torricelli. The FBI didn’t like the fact that they had written this—he had written this story about how they dropped the ball on that, so they went after his phone records. And three years later, he talked to some of his sources who had not talked to him since then, and they said, "We’re not going to talk to you, because we know they’re getting your phone records."

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you all for being with us. Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights. William Binney and Thomas Drake both worked for the National Security Agency for years, and both ultimately resigned. Thomas Drake was prosecuted. They were trying to get him under the Espionage Act. All of those charges were dropped. William Binney held at gunpoint by the FBI in his shower, never prosecuted. Both had expressed deep concern about the surveillance of American citizens by the U.S. government. You can go to our website at democracynow.org for our hours of interviews with them, as well." - Democracy Now!

Let me start out by saying I work for a county Sheriff’s Office and will give you some insight or an idea what goes on in an officers/deputies head with any situation (which could pertain to this one)

First, I am a big nerd and have been around computers all my life and the internet so I have seen many police videos online. So let me say first that I agree that there are bad officers out there. Are we all bad? No, but the few ruin it for the many and I’m sorry to see such hate and distrust because of it. The only thing I or any law enforcement can do about that is do our job correctly and wipe the stigma away one person at a time.

Second, when it comes to responding to a 911 call (A call for service), 9 times out of 10 you do not know what you are going to. Dispatch (radio or control whatever moniker you want to use) can only give you the info that the person calling 911 gives them. Say this video instance, that someone from inside the home or a neighbor called 911 because of possible domestic violence going on inside the home. This is usually all the info an officer will get before showing up on scene. Now if the officer approaches the house and tries to make contact and is confronted by a man who has locked his door and is shouting at you, this is going to cause alarm with the office. Not only can he not make contact inside the house to verify if someone is actually hurt or to clear the call as it was made on accident by a neighbor, he has a male subject who is disobeying his commands to answer the door. I’m assuming this officer made a few attempts to make contact before he called for backup (fill units). Now with multiple officers, they will attempt to make contact a few more times. These officers broke down the front door to make contact inside the house. The only reason they would do that is because they saw danger or possible harm to someone inside, or the call made to 911 dictated that there was someone inside the house who was injured or in fear of their life.

To be honest, there are many reasons why responding authorities would break down that door. Maybe the 911 call was from a family member inside the home stating that their brother etc… was off his medications and was threating to hurt himself or others. Maybe he was acting erratic because he was off his meds and police broke down the door due to this individual having a violent past when he stops taking his medications. Maybe there were no meds involved at all and this individual has a violent past so the officers chose to act based on past experiences with said individual.

See, that’s the problem with almost 98% of these videos, WE DON’T KNOW. There are so many possible scenarios that without full disclosure on what went on, what info did the police have, and what were they witnessing on scene. We cannot “Monday night quarterback” these videos. I know videos prior to this have shown officer’s acting in the wrong with all the info available, but that doesn’t give us the right to assume this or others videos are showing officers acting in the wrong. I do not go to work every day planning on hurting people or making false arrests. I have said this many times to people who I have arrested or deal with when they ask “why are you arresting me”, “are you taking that money out of my pocket and stealing it?”, “this is a false arrest!”, my response is your few dollars or property or the statistic of making one more arrest if false is not worth my job. I am not going to make false allegations or take someone’s property that would cause me to lose my job and most importantly my pension. My family relies on me to bring money home so I can provide food and shelter. I would like to think almost every officer/deputy thinks and believes the same. We do what is right, even if during the situation it may seem wrong to others (civilians), we do what we think is right so at the end of the day we can go home to our families and the city/county stays a little safer. That’s my whole day, trying to make the city a better place one call for service at a time, and then get home safe to my family.

I really wish we were appreciated like firemen or military but I know we never will be. Law enforcement only show up when things have gone bad to worse. Nobody ever wants to go to jail. Try having a job where everyone hates you no matter what good you do. Yet we still go to work and put our lives on the line everyday (many of us die each year) so people can sit at home or in there office cubicle and judge videos of our actions. So please try to remember we are not all bad.

Just my .02