Important safety tip (#9 in a series).

Let us say, just for the sake of argument, that you are a police officer.

Let us say, also just for the sake of argument, that you like to go to bars in your off-duty hours and meet women (or men, depending on your particular gender bias).

Let us also say that you are at a bar one night, meet an attractive person of the appropriate gender, and you’d like to get their phone number and address.

Now, as a police officer, you have extraordinary access to look this kind of thing up. You may be tempted to make use of that access. You might want to wait until your next shift and then run your subject through police databases, the way the Mafia Cops did. If you’re desperate enough, you may think you can call up someone who is on duty, tell them you’re investigating a crime, and get information that way.

Julie Fisher told The Spokesman-Review that she was working as a waitress at Sullivan Scoreboard the night Edwards came in. She described his actions as “crazy.”
Fisher said Edwards made advances on almost every woman in the business. She said she found him in the women’s bathroom harassing “a woman trying to use the toilet” at closing time.

Yeah, that kind of desperate. Anyway, all of this may sound like a good idea at the time. It isn’t.

Because when the police department gets a complaint from the woman whose door you were banging on early in the morning, they are going to fire your ass.

Extra bonus point 1: It also doesn’t help if you’ve spent 10 months on suspension, with pay, while the police department looks into your relationship with an “unlicensed bounty hunter”.

Extra bonus point 2: Guess the city and police department. Go on, guess.

I’m not generally a big fan of Justice Department supervision of police departments, but Spokane is starting to look like a place that needs adult supervision for their police department. Or maybe they just need to fire everyone and let the National Guard police the city while they rebuild the department from scratch?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Clippings, Cops, Law, Safety, Stupid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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