[joesmo]

I too had a cop play chicken with me in his SUV while I was peacefully standing on the sidewalk. I'm not surprised to find out it's happened to someone else. There were actually at least a dozen people there. Anyone else would have been charged with attempted murder. For the cop, it was just another day at the office.

Radley Balko is one brave writer, that's for sure. But even he's just going to write about the atrocities here after the fact. Maybe what I should have written is not that no one cares, but that very few people do, and they cannot change anything. Even Balko does not realize the full extent of the problem of living in a police state like this, probably because he doesn't recognize it as a police state. And while his assessments of what exactly is wrong with our police in "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces", for example, are spot on, his solutions are lame. He understands the hate that communities in the US have for police, yet suggests that more foot patrols will help. We are way, way beyond that. Without strict liability laws and restrictions on police, there is no fixing this. While cops can get away with murder, there will be no fixing this. If having justice, which includes not murdering innocent people, is not enough of an issue for Americans to change this system of horrific, Holocaust-scale imprisonment, it really does seem like almost nobody cares.