QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From the Houston Chronicle:

Houston trooper arrested in alleged ID card scam

A state trooper is free on bail today after his arrest in Houston on charges accusing him of selling Texas identification cards for $1,200 apiece, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

Department of Public Safety Trooper Richard Rodriguez, 47, was arrested Monday after the issuance of a criminal complaint charging him with fraud. He posted bail Wednesday.

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Child molestation, robbery, drug use, rape, brutality, willful violation of civil liberties, racism, and, of course, petty fraud. And more. Since I started Real Art almost four years ago, I've posted on case after case of police corruption and crime, and they just keep on coming. This happens so much, so consistently, that I'm simply unable to buy the "few bad apples" point of view. Indeed, dismissing chronic police abuses as isolated incidents simply allows the orgy of arrogance to continue. And that's what I think it comes down to, arrogance. As I've said many times before, I don't think it's necessarily individual arrogance, that cops are somehow inherently bad guys. Quite the reverse: we need cops, and it's dangerous work; they're clearly performing an important social service overall. But I just can't escape the sense that police culture, nationwide, eggs on what were probably latent tendencies in people before they joined up. That is, there seems to be a sort of us-and-them groupthink among police officers that morphs into a kind of elitism. Or, like I said, arrogance, which leads some cops to do bad things, and other cops to look the other way out of loyalty. The effects of this could probably be greatly lessened through some kind of counter-cultural training, but nobody seems to conceptualize the problem in this way.

And that means that cop corruption is here to stay.

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