Sounds like you are believing these women, sight unseen. By me questioning their wide-eyed innocent proclamations of "gosh, all I did was ask a simple question and they totally freaked out" doesn't mean I turn a blind eye to abuse of power. I refused to be duped by a one-sided story.

Case in point
>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

@longde @ulysses1904 @Skeeve
All three of you are asshats for trying to dismiss the border patrol's blatant abuse of power as "not deserving of sympathy".
If you got detained, frisked, had your belongings searched and stolen, for any reason, you'd be pissed too.
Harassing these women served no purpose.
Neither country is safer for it.
Not to mention, your tax dollars were wasted in the process.
For that (the first two, more than the latter) you should be highly offended.

@GenjiKilpatrick, I'm not "trying to dismiss the border patrol's blatant abuse of power" because frankly I'm not sure there was an abuse of power to dismiss. All we have to go on is the word of some radical anti-government conspiracy theorists - not exactly neutral and unbiased witnesses when it comes to government abuse.

I don't trust these girls to wipe their own asses (TP is probably a fascist plot to control our bodily functions, don't you know) let alone provide accurate testimony regarding anything the government does.

@longde @ulysses1904 @Skeeve

All three of you are asshats for trying to dismiss the border patrol's blatant abuse of power as "not deserving of sympathy".

If you got detained, frisked, had your belongings searched and stolen, for any reason, you'd be pissed too.

Harassing these women served no purpose.
Neither country is safer for it.
Not to mention, your tax dollars were wasted in the process.

For that (the first two, more than the latter) you should be highly offended.

I'd like to hear the border patrol's version of these events. About 300,000 people cross the US/Canada border every day, there isn't enough time or manpower to search and interrogate people without a reason.

While I don't doubt that harassment happens at the border, something is fishy about their story. It doesn't help their cause that they are the type of people warning about chemtrails and other retarded conspiracy theories.

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Conan O'Brien in Canada - Border Patrol. Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

Here's a bit of irony: my Border Patrol uniforms were...you guessed it...hecho en Mexico. Probably still are.

1. People have jobs for all sorts of reasons and most people will put up with a few crappy things if they like the rest of the job enough. If there were 1000 reasons he liked his job, but there were two or three he disagreed with (but not enough to cause him to renege on his duty) then why should he leave the job?

2. Lots of law enforcement types don't agree with all of the laws they are enforcing but, until those laws are no longer laws, they will continue to enforce them. Just as someone may disagree with drug laws but still abide by them out of principle (or even civic duty). This guy was a border patrol agent; likely he agreed with, and was proud of, the majority of what he was doing. He just expressed an opinion that it might not be the best way to do it.>> ^Boise_Lib:

>> ^longde:
I feel for him; but if I were his boss, I'd fire him too.

Leaving aside for the moment whether he should have been fired.
Why the hell would he want to bust people and throw them in jail for something he doesn't believe in?

>> ^gwiz665:

Alcohol is not the killer, the gun is. You can't kill anyone with alcohol, you need the car (or a weapon).
>> ^Psychologic:
>> ^gwiz665:
This is why amateurs should not have guns and this is why gun laws in the states are also crazy.
Might as well outlaw alcohol too then. Idiot drunks kill people on the highway, so obviously no one can be trusted to drink.
On a side note, I know an "Alcohol Enforcement Officer"... drinks more than anyone I've ever met, and not in a good way.



the same could be said for guns. it takes someone pulling the trigger to kill.

i do want to add a bit of commentary on these developing stories. between this and the jose guerera case, both cases piss me right the fuck off and heres why. In both instances you have an overwhelming force subduing another. in this case, gun toting cop vs knife toting dude. in jose's case, an entire swat team vs one armed man. the end result was death, fucking wrongful, wasteful death.

now having said that, the commentary i would like to add is this: i know that in armed conflict and escalating situations such as these (presumably, even hypothetically, ie, he could have charged the cop with the knife off screen and an attacker can close distance in most cases faster than the shooter can react and fire) it takes steel nerves and lightning reflexes reinforced by training to make the decision to fire or not fire.

........however, when i was in afghanistan, i found myself in the middle of a legit "mexican standoff". long story short, my PCC team were to accompany the scout platoon to escort a rogue afghan border patrol police general back to our FOB to speak with his superiors. When we arrived to our PCC compound we found that he was there, along with over 100 of his loyals, preparing to mount a raid of their own (they were usually running illegal checkpoints, shit like that). Naturally when they figured out that we were there to detain their leader (in their eyes, our direct orders were to not detain but persuade him to come with us, if he refused we were to leave without incident). My CO talked with the general and persuaded him to willingly come with us.....but to his loyals, we were capturing him. within seconds, the guards they had in their towers had oriented their crew served weapons inwards, ANP loyals were loading their RPG's with armor piercers and taking fighting positions behind buildings oriented at us, you could hear dozens of ak's "racking" (chambering a round). There was over a hundred of them and less than 20 of us. Had it exploded into a firefight, we certainly woulved fucked all shit up.......but few, if any, of us were leaving alive. all it wouldve taken was one round to go off from either side to fully escalate that encounter to a full on gun battle. fortunately we kept our cool (as did the anp loyals), assessed the situation, navigated the battle space, reinforced by our training which emphasizes self control, discipline, and situational awareness, and we were able to diffuse the situation without incident. Not a single round was fired. and we had accomplished our mission (btw turns out the general had been hoarding police gun stocks, by the thousands, and had cached them at his house and was selling them off to taliban)

now my point being if i and the members of my team had the intestinal fortitude and mental tenacity to diffuse that highlyvolatile situation without incident, especially considering the higher stakes (this was in the middle of a fucking war, not in someones neighborhood or on a crosswalk), so to speak.......what is your fucking excuse Tucson swat team? what is your fucking excuse, cop in this video?

And I find it interesting that DFT chose to list the very base things that government in the US was supposedly created to defend as his reasons for justifying our current big government. Murder, slavery, robbery, rape, child molestation, etc. all fall within our basic rights of life and liberty.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" (U.S. Declaration of Independence)

But if this was only what government was currently protecting (only our lives and our liberties), then you'd not hear a word from me. Not a peep. But what part of "preventing" rape, murder, slavery, theft, etc. comes from me paying for unjust wars, paying for bombing women and children, paying to militarize the domestic police, seatbelt laws, interstate border patrol, DUI laws, etc.?

And if I do NOT consent, then it's "get the hell out" from the apologists.

According to statistics from the FBI and Arizona police agencies, crime in Arizona border towns has been “essentially flat for the past decade.” For example, “In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes.” The Pima County sheriff reported that “the border has never been more secure.”

FBI statistics show violent crime rates in all of the border states are lower than they were a decade ago — yet Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) reports that the violence is “the worst I have ever seen.” President Obama justifiably asserted last week that “the southern border is more secure today than any time in the past 20 years,” yet Rush Limbaugh judged the president to be “fit for the psycho ward” on the basis of that remark.

Next, there’s Brewer’s claim that “the majority” of people immigrating illegally “are coming here and they’re bringing drugs, and they’re doing drop houses and they’re extorting people and they’re terrorizing the families. That is the truth.”

No, it isn’t. The Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector has apprehended more than 170,000 undocumented immigrants since Oct. 1, but only about 1,100 drug prosecutions have been filed in Arizona in that time.

The claim that illegal immigrants are behind most killings of law-enforcement personnel is also bunk. Arizona state Sen. Sylvia Allen claimed that “in the last few years 80 percent of our law enforcement that have been killed or wounded have been by an illegal.” A Phoenix police spokesman told the Arizona Republic’s E.J. Montini that the real figure for killings is less than 25 percent, and that there are no statistics on wounded officers.

So what is this “terrible border security crisis” that Brewer says has only “gotten worse”? She complained recently to Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren about the Obama administration’s handling of the border: “They haven’t did [sic] their job.”

[via Dana Millbank @ WaPo]

Yup, those are both him! Never seen those before. Good stuff.

In reply to this comment by kymbos:
I've seen this guy do a few skits before, and something about him just really hits my funny bone. The first clip I saw of his was the American/Canadian border patrol officer (I'll find the link). He also did a dating video that was pretty popular. I'm an Aussie, and I'm usually more into British comedy - this guy has something different to almost all American comedians, but I'm not sure what it is.

http://videosift.com/video/Sketch-Pad-Canadian-Border-Patrol
http://videosift.com/video/Perfect-Dating-Video

Hope I haven't got the wrong guy.

In reply to this comment by MaxWilder:
This is a really funny guy I knew in college. He's in the Groundlings, which is sketch comedy and improv. This is the first time I've seen him make a video, and I thought it was hilarious. Half the humor comes from how real the video seems at first, so I could understand some people getting upset at being "tricked".

I've seen this guy do a few skits before, and something about him just really hits my funny bone. The first clip I saw of his was the American/Canadian border patrol officer (I'll find the link). He also did a dating video that was pretty popular. I'm an Aussie, and I'm usually more into British comedy - this guy has something different to almost all American comedians, but I'm not sure what it is.

http://videosift.com/video/Sketch-Pad-Canadian-Border-Patrol
http://videosift.com/video/Perfect-Dating-Video

Hope I haven't got the wrong guy.

In reply to this comment by MaxWilder:
This is a really funny guy I knew in college. He's in the Groundlings, which is sketch comedy and improv. This is the first time I've seen him make a video, and I thought it was hilarious. Half the humor comes from how real the video seems at first, so I could understand some people getting upset at being "tricked".

Damn, people. Everyone should know by now that you don't argue with the people enforcing laws, you argue with judges and lawmakers. Cops can't change policy, generally don't give a shit, and just want to do their job and go home. Once you reach a certain level of belligerence, they're going to arrest you if - for nothing else - just to cover their ass.

You're a border patrol officer. A belligerent, nervous guy crosses border. You know he's probably harmless, but he is putting up a lot of fuss. You let him through. He gets arrested stateside - guess who loses his job? Also, what kind of message does that send to people who are here for nefarious purposes - raise a fuss, and we'll let you through.

So you arrest him and let the judge sort it out.

Dude should have come down off his soapbox after the second time through the speech. He could have answered six questions and been on his way.

It was an abuse of power. The guy could have been the biggest asshole in the country, but unless there was some reason he was to be detained other than "he's a douche and he's giving me a hard time", then something needs to be reinforced/reeducated at the border crossing training level.

They are not there to be the manners police and harass jerks having a bad hair day. I've personally gone through that check point a half dozen times and it's always been the US side that was staffed with folks that had sticks up their asses.

Everyone has bad days. Border patrol as well. But when you have the power to detain someone and press charges of assault because they pulled away from you, you need to be held to a higher standard of responsibility and thicker skin with said powers or find another career.

I get "terrorism" and "drug wars" and I understand the stress they're put under, but this sort of thing shouldn't be tolerated.

This guy was a douche from jump street. Normally I would say that you shouldn't treat law enforcement the way he did. But honestly, you shouldn't treat anyone the way he treats the border officer. This isn't just 'be polite and you won't be detained', be polite and people will go out of their way to help you.

Another way this douche is a douche: after complaining about oh, how can he be expected to sit down when he isn't given a reason to sit down, he screams at his wife to sit down, just sit down, just sit down. "Why?" "Just sit down. Just sit down. Sit down." Fuck off guy.

Show some respect to your wife. Show some respect to the border patrol. Show some respect to your fellow man so we can all do what needs to get done.

Smile at someone today. Thank the guy who serves you your morning coffee. And if a cop is outside on your way in to buy that coffee, offer to buy him one too. Pay shit forward.