The number one job of the police force is to keep communities safe.
And there’s no bigger threat to community safety than violent crime.
Which is why it’s appalling that, in Oregon, raiding medical marijuana suppliers ranks as a higher priority than stopping rapes.
More than 70 law enforcement officers participated in raids against Lori Duckworth and other medical marijuana providers, but no officer could assist a woman who called 911 begging for help.
The woman who called 911 in Josephine County, Oregon was afraid her ex-boyfriend pounding on the door outside would break in and beat her, which he had just done a few weeks prior.
The 911 dispatcher’s response? “You know, obviously, if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away?”.
Eventually he broke into the residence and killed her.
If only she was selling medical marijuana, then maybe they would have come.
The police don’t seem averse to committing violent crime themselves, either:
Tim Maher, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, asked 20 police chiefs whether police sexual misconduct was a problem; 18 responded in the affirmative. The 13 chiefs willing to offer estimates thought an average of 19 percent of cops were involved—if correct, that translates to more than 150,000 police officers nationwide. An informal effort by the Cato Institute in 2010 to track the number of police sexual-misconduct cases just in news stories counted 618 complaints nationwide that year, 354 of which involved forcible nonconsensual sexual activity like sexual assault or sexual battery.
Recap: we have cops who can’t respond to actual crimes, because they’re chasing after phony ones when they aren’t committing crimes themselves.
What kind of society do we live in where any of this is acceptable?
